I used to wonder how ignorant of US Government somebody had to be to think that “agreement” had any official status whatsoever in the US.
***It was enough to get the Ukes to give up their nukes. Apparently there was a whole country that thought the USA couldn’t be the big @$$#0/e that YOU knew we could be.
I guess one has only to be as ignorant as Kevmo.
***One only has to be as much of an @$$#0/e as Mariner to foresee and approve of nuclear proliferation betrayal on such a scale that it threatens the whole world.
Nobody else in the US believes an agreement signed by Bill Clinton, against the advice of both houses of congress,
***Against the advice? Both houses of congress said they wanted nukes to proliferate? Well it appears that’s where we’re headed, since every country on the planet knows that we cannot be trusted to keep our word when it comes to nuke proliferation. And you approve of this. You have an incredible level of evil inside you.
and never submitted to either house for passage or ratification,
***Uhh, that’s quite a bit different than saying both sides were against it. Not that it matters to a situational ethics libertarian relatism moral squid such as yourself.
binds any person or element of our government.
***What BINDS us is knowing what the right thing to do is, and doing it. But since you’ve taken such an ambivalent amoral approach to moral things, it becomes an act of astonishment to discuss anything with you.
NOBODY but Kevmo.
***Nobody but Mariner is that evil, so far. Those are very antithetical values for a conservative on FR, by the way.
- It's not a treaty;
- It has no enforcement mechanisms beyond going to the UN Security Council;
- No penalties for violations;
- Includes provisions regarding non-interference on not just military matters, but also political and economic ones (which America was guilty of violating on the latter two);
- And that *all* subsequent American administrations did not consider the memo binding whatsoever on the matter of whether military intervention was required?
That's the nature of Realpolitik, and the fiction of "international law": Great Powers uphold agreements and treaties if they believe the terms are in their national interests; otherwise, they think nothing of violating them and telling everyone else to pound sand.
The Budapest Memorandum, in the long term, turned out to be nothing more than political PR (because the Ukrainians had no political capital to resist either America or Russia; Russia went along because it meant getting all of the nukes they had given to Ukraine during the USSR days back; and America did so because nuclear non-proliferation was still the name of the game).
To say the Budapest Memorandum is equivalent to a mutual defense pact is simply not rooted in reality (notwithstanding the fact that the amount of assistance provided to the Ukraine thus far has devolved this conflict into yet another US-Russia proxy war).
We have no business getting involved in a longstanding ethnic feud between two Eastern European nations; not when we don't even have our own house in order.