The three states agreeing to this deal are down river (excluding two Mexican states that are further down river), and I suppose they are the ones most reliant on the river.
The Mexican states/Mexican govt don't need to, they have a treaty with the US govt. The US govt is required to send X amount of water across the border. I forget the # and am not willing to look it up right now. The US govt has been supplementing water across the border for a while now with wells. Nothing new here.
That said, never found a better word for it, so maybe it’s correct.
>> That said, never found a better word for it, so maybe it’s correct.
> Per the constitution treaties are binding with the force of federal law.
1) I think that's controversial, or at least not so simple. IIRC, there's a question in US law if treaties have domestic force on their own, or must be implemented by "enabling legislation."
2) In any case, the US Constitution can't make "international law" international law, at best it makes a treaty domestic US law.
Russia is a international pariah now, with no more friends and the only states doing buisness with them are doing so, because russia is weak and without choice, so you can have favorable terms with them. Even china openly condemned russias aggression. They still do buisness with russia of course, but to very good conditions.
And china just did a important states meeting for central asian states:
https://thediplomat.com/2023/05/in-xian-chinas-xi-calls-for-...
Basically all former soviet states and russia was not invited or mentioned at all. China takes what russia cannot hold anymore - and russia still has to smile and dares no criticism, because without china - they would be done economically. China could not have done this prior the invasion.
And if china would try to invade Taiwan - then the military outcome is far from settled and china tries hard to avoid the political costs of a invasion. They rather want to strongarm taiwan into a forced "voluntarily" unification. Otherwise they would have invaded long ago.
Mexico worked with the US on NAFTA because they trust US to buy cars and pay them. Not because they they think we will nuke them or blow them up with a death star.
if you gain a reputation of a country that does not honour agreements, no-one will be interested in doing agreements with you.
I agree with you and others that the driver for abiding by treaties is not US law but us reputation. But that’s the GP’s point: the law is not the main driver here.
If tensions get really bad, sure the US armed forces could probably take Mexico in a fight, but then what? What good would that do the US?
It would be a pretty idiotic thing to do, but sure, it's possible.
I gotchu.
1944's "UTILIZATION OF WATERS OF THE COLORADO AND TIJUANA RIVERS AND OF THE RIO GRANDE" treaty between the US and Mexico established the "International Boundary and Water Commission" (IBWC). The text of the 1944 treaty is available from IBWC's website[0][1].
According to the text of the 1944 treaty (article 10 deals with the Colorado River), Mexico is entitled to at minimum 1.5 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River, and in wet years is entitled to 1.7 million acre-feet of water.
Based on the submitted article, which says "3m acre-feet of water is expected to be conserved over the next three years". If that comes down to 1m acre-feet per year, that's 2/3 of the quantity of water guaranteed to Mexico.
[0] https://www.ibwc.gov/Treaties_Minutes/treaties.html [all treaties overseen by IBWC] [1] https://www.ibwc.gov/Files/1944Treaty.pdf [PDF of 1944 treaty]
I wonder why Colorado and Utah were not involved in the deal? If one of them had a problem with it, would they have standing to sue?
What if, hypothetically, Colorado built a dam and stopped the flow of water to the downstream states?
If Colorado wanted to build a dam, that’s completely different and the other states would likely challenge it in court.
The Colorado River Compact effectively divides states into two buckets, the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states. The Upper Basin states already came to an agreement a while ago; the Lower Basin states only came to an agreement today.
So it would be illegal in Colorado to build such a dam because you would be blocking the water that belongs to someone else.
In Colorado, it is illegal to collect the rainwater that lands on your roof because that water would normally flow into a river and that river water belongs to someone else. I used to live in Colorado and about 10-15 years ago, there was a change in the state law that the media proclaimed made it legal for you to collect the rainfall that landed on your roof. They left out the conditions that the statute required: you had to have an existing well permit, you could only use the rainwater for the same purposes that your well permit allowed (so if the permit only allowed watering livestock, you could not use the water for your garden), then there was another stickler - there could not be a water utility adjacent to your property (even if you were not connected to that water company). There were 3 other requirements, but those 3 were so narrowly focused that the law basically upheld the illegality of collecting rainfall.
I've been following this very closely for a while - the primary issue here is still agricultural businesses in California consuming more then their water rights permit.