\ 5. \ casual about their international obligations and will disregard them whenever they are inconvenient, It is not unusual to find both of these views being held by the same person, Neither of them finds much support in practice, Those who believe that a treaty is the answer to everything overlook the dreary wasteland of ineffective agreements that have been drafted in disregard of the limits to the loads which the treaty mechanism can bear. Those who make light of treaty commitments in ceneral seem to ignore the fact that the vast majority of such engagements are at considerable inconvenience to the parties, | 4 hh po» continuously, honestly, and regularly observed even \e under adverse conditions and nn, =; é Another common belief is that treaties cont iny.orcan be made to contain, Single, definite answers to all questions of concrete application, and that strains.on treaty observance are merely questions of moral behavior. Treaty failures, in other words, are recarded as lapses in virtue, and it is assumed that the way to avoid them is to strengthen the moral fiber of nations. It would be foolish to deny that over the years there have been plenty of cases of deliberate bad faith in the non-execution of treaties, international law have been sighing about it for centuries. The writers on Yet it is not help- ful just to charge off to the fickleness of sovereigns the many treaty failures that have occurred, and stop there. Most of the time there are quite under- standable reasons why treaties fail to work out as expected, and in numerous cases it would be difficult if not impossible to place moral responsibility for such failure. A good many notorious cases of treaty violation have been concerned with treaties of peace imposed on vanquished nations after a war. Where such treaties place onerous conditions on the losers, as they almost always do, it can be safely predicted that they will be faithfully carried out only so long as the victors have both the power and the inclination to enforce them. Where these grow weak and observance slackens off, the erstwhile victors will certainly ery