Question

Write about Krutz and Peake. Treaty Politics and the Rise of Executive Agreements. Describe what happened and why is it interesting. How did the U.S get involved.

Answer 1

In foreign relations, U.S. presidents have exercised a growing independence through the use of executive agreements. The U.S. Constitution specifies that two-thirds of the Senate must ratify a proposed treaty but makes no provision for other forms of international agreements. In 1942 the Supreme Court affirmed the legality of executive agreements, and since World War II, they have outnumbered treaties by more than ten to one.

Glen S. Krutz and Jeffrey S. Peake argue that the preference for executive agreements is the result of a symbiotic evolution of the executive and the legislative branches and that in order for the United States to survive in a complex, ever-changing global environment and maintain its world power status, it must fulfill international commitments swiftly and confidently. Members of Congress concur that executive agreements allow each branch to function more effectively. At the same time, the House continues to oversee particular policy areas, and presidents still submit the majority of the most significant international commitments to the Senate as treaties.

Krutz and Peake conclude that executive agreements represent a mutual adaptation of the executive and the legislature in a system of shared power.

Krutz and Peake remind scholars to see the brilliance and adaptive capacity of the separation of powers system and to rethink the implications of presidential use of executive agreements. By factoring in the role of the Senate and House in implementation, the authors demonstrate that executive agreements, rather than reflecting the demise of the separation of powers system, constitute pragmatic adaptations by coordinated institutions. Krutz and Peake's examination of the increased use of executive agreements offers a valuable lesson in how the president and Congress have responded and adjusted to the growth in the complexity of foreign relations to meet the demands of an ever-increasingly complex and interconnected international community.

Krutz and Peake's book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on presidential-congressional relations on international agreements, and puts another stake in the heart of the "imperial presidency" argument. Their discussion of the formalized process that takes place within the State Department to determine the appropriate form of an agreements adds substantially to our understanding of the politics surrounding it. The authors' examination of delays surrounding treaty consent is also genuinely new, as are their results about ideological distance between the President and Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the distinction between high and low politics.