Joint bodies in international agreements of the United States: Keeping your friends close and your enemies closer?

This paper aims to synthesize the literature on the foreign policy of the United States (US) and on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) without delegation and pooling. As the world’s hegemon, the US has historically been wary of international cooperation that could encroach upon its sovereignty. It has, on average, only reluctantly joined or formed IGOs that delegate authority to international secretariats due to concerns about agency losses. Additionally, as the world’s most powerful country, the US faces steep relative losses from pooling sovereignty and allowing itself to be outvoted in collective treaty bodies. Still, the US cannot effectively conduct its foreign policy without any institutionalized cooperation. One solution to this dilemma is noncommittal cooperation through informal IGOs (IIGOs). While informal cooperation carries lower sovereignty costs, it also provides fewer benefits since it is more challenging to formalize and transform collective decisions into legally binding form. Overall, this type of cooperation is suboptimal for the US, as it hinders its ability to use its considerable power resources to shape international cooperation in binding form. Joint bodies offer a better alternative. Joint bodies are IGOs without delegation and pooling, but they are established through formal treaties and are typically authorized to make binding decisions by mutual consent. Therefore, joint bodies do not entail any sovereignty losses from delegation or pooling, yet they are embedded in formal international treaties that enable soft and hard forms of cooperation, in the form of recommendations or mutually binding decisions. Countries cooperating with the US can use joint bodies as a form of insurance that grants them the opportunity to shape, or at least gain prior knowledge of, planned US actions. Still, even a powerful and resourceful country like the US cannot establish joint bodies indiscriminately in every agreement due to limited bureaucratic resources. As such, we present two alternatives on how the US decides where to set up joint bodies. First, the US can reward allies by granting them privileged access through joint bodies. Second, the US can use these bodies to engage its adversaries and manage relationships with countries that it faces a higher risk of conflict with. To distinguish between these two perspectives, we rely on an original dataset of approximately 4,000 international agreements concluded by the US since 1945 and sourced from the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS).