Damaged Relations: How Treaty Withdrawal Impacts International Cooperation

Abstract

This article examines how treaty withdrawal affects international cooperation. By terminating its treaty commitments, the exiting state could earn a reputation for unreliability, making other states less willing to cooperate with it. However, states’ reactions to withdrawal vary markedly, even though it is public behavior. I develop an experiential theory of international cooperation that explains this variation. I argue that withdrawal damages the exiting state's relations with other treaty members, causing them to ratify fewer agreements with it in the future. I test this theory using an original data set of all treaties registered with the United Nations and a case study of France's exit from NATO's Status of Forces Agreement. I find that withdrawal reduces treaty members’ ratification of agreements with the exiting state by 7.9% in the 7 years after exit. This effect increases with the salience and material cost of withdrawal and can spill across issue areas.