T REATIES

J. B. Duroselle and

Ian J. Bickerton

Tracing the history of treaties entered into by the United States provides an illuminating insight into the changing nature, concerns, and direction of United States foreign relations. Given that the Constitution provides that the Senate must be advised and give consent before their ratification, treaties also provide a revealing insight into the ever-changing relationship between the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government, as well as domestic politics and foreign relations.

Thus we see the Republic in its early years enter a series of treaties of amity and trade with European powers, followed in the nineteenth century by further commercial treaties (with their corollaries, freedom of the seas in time of war, provision for the safety of shipwrecked sailors, access to major communication routes), and treaties delineating the nation's expanding boundaries as well as defining its legal relations with indigenous Americans. Despite its own successful interventionist policy of military and economic expansion—especially in Central America and the Pacific—in the first half of the twentieth century the United States was reluctant to enter the most destructive conflict Europe had yet seen, and the Senate succeeded in limiting American involvement in international legal arrangements designed to prevent its recurrence. Following a second round of world war, in the latter half of the twentieth century, and reflecting a widespread American fear created by a ideologically polarized and increasingly militarized world, the United States entered a series of collective security alliances and arms—especially nuclear arms—limitation treaties. Reflecting renewed American efforts to establish global hegemony, the United States also embarked upon a number of economic agreements in the latter part of the twentieth century to break down what Washington regarded as restrictive trade barriers.

With the transformation of numerous former European colonies in Africa and Asia into independent states and a tremendous increase in the world's population in the second half of the twentieth century, the changed nature of international relations and the role of the United States in world affairs can be traced in the appearance of new kinds of treaties dealing with such matters as human rights, ecology and the environment, and the utilization of outer space. As the twenty-first century began much of U.S. foreign relations and domestic politics was taken up with determining how to respond to these new challenges.

See also A MBASSADORS , E XECUTIVE A GENTS, AND S PECIAL R EPRESENTATIVES ; A RMS C ONTROL AND D ISARMAMENT ; C OLLECTIVE S ECURITY ; C ONGRESSIONAL P OWER ; T HE C ONSTITUTION ; E CONOMIC P OLICY AND T HEORY ; E NVIRONMENTAL D IPLOMACY ; H UMAN R IGHTS ; I NTERNATIONAL L AW ; P RESIDENTIAL P OWER ; N UCLEAR S TRATEGY AND D IPLOMACY ; T ARIFF P OLICIES .