The Trump administration has announced that the U.S. intends to withdraw from the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. I think this is awful, as I naively thought that a treaty being “ratified” by Congress and signed by the President meant that the legislative and executive branches had come to a consensus on adopting it, and therefore a consensus would be needed to break it. By contrast, recent agreements including the Paris agreement were signed only by the executive branch. Here is what a site called Just Security (which I know nothing about) has to say.

As a matter of domestic law, the mainstream legal view, as taken in the Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law, is that the president may constitutionally withdraw the United States from a Senate-approved treaty where, as here, the withdrawal is lawful under international law and neither the Senate’s resolution of advice and consent nor a congressional law has put limits on withdrawal. The president’s power to do so has never been definitively resolved by the courts. In the 1979 case of Goldwater v. Carter (which involved President Jimmy Carter’s termination of a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan), a fractured Supreme Court declined to address this issue. In practice, however, presidents have exercised this unilateral withdrawal power, especially in the years since Goldwater.

Theoretically, it sounds like the Senate could try to insert language saying a President cannot unilaterally break a treaty. But there is really no protection. A treaty is a weaker agreement than I thought, and in recent decades Congress has not even been participating in the process of discussing and signing them. Other countries really cannot rely on the U.S. to honor any agreement from one four-year political administration to the next.

Here is what the Constitution actually says:

He [i.e. the President, whom the Founding Father-Gods assume in 1783 shall henceforth be male] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur

Too bad it doesn’t say “make, break or modify”, but it doesn’t. Perhaps we need some more practical mechanism for modernizing our outdated constitution. But those rules would have to be updated in…the Constitution.