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tpmlast Tuesday at 12:12 PM1 replyview on HN

So no treaty was broken? Why did you write "Sure it did" when you know it wasn't?

> They actually can pick and choose and both have done so successfully.

They didn't. What happened was that some parts of some treaty were renegotiated or amended and agreed by both parties. Which is quite common in any such relationship.


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mike_hearnlast Tuesday at 1:25 PM

You can use that definition of breaking a treaty if you like. But it's not a good idea. It sends the world a message that negotiating with European countries is dangerous because to avoid getting screwed you'd have to write down all known common sense and social conventions in the text of the treaty, and probably include the contents of a specific dictionary as well, and even then they might just do something crazy you never predicted whilst claiming the agreement was being respected.

Note: this argument was actually used by the pro-Leave faction in the UK. They explicitly argued that any deal Cameron reached with the other EU member states would be worthless because European countries can't be trusted to honor their agreements when it becomes ideologically inconvenient. And that argument landed, which is why Cameron returned with a vaguely worded emergency break deal and then never mentioned it again - nobody took it seriously, and he was forced to campaign on the state of the union as it was, and lost. So these tactics do have a cost.

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