The obligation must be found in the text

National Review reports that a Dutch lawsuit could, in its words, "undermine U.S. energy security." The precise legal mechanism is not fully described in the available lead, so I will mark what follows as inference rather than established fact. But the shape of the question is one I have spent a career examining: what does a nation actually agree to when it accedes to an international instrument, and who holds the authority to say?

I learned, in the long negotiations that produced the Treaty of Paris and again in the treaty with Britain that bore my name, that ambiguous language is not a gift — it is a deferred quarrel. If an international agreement on climate or energy contains language that a foreign court may now construe to reach into a sovereign nation's domestic production decisions, the fault lies first with those who drafted that language carelessly, and second with those who ratified it without demanding precision.

Comity is not capitulation

Comity — the principle by which nations extend good-faith recognition to each other's legal acts — is a foundation of the international order I helped to build. But comity has limits that the founding generation understood instinctively: it does not require a republic to submit its domestic legislative choices to the judgment of a foreign bench that was never granted that jurisdiction by any clear act of the people's representatives. If the Dutch proceeding rests on a treaty the United States signed, the obligation must be located in the treaty's actual words. If those words do not grant such jurisdiction, the case for compliance weakens considerably.

The Senate's role is not ceremonial

I wrote in Federalist No. 64 that the treaty power requires men of information and integrity, working with care and deliberation — precisely because a treaty, once made, becomes the law of the land alongside the Constitution itself. That elevation is both the treaty's strength and its danger. A carelessly worded clause in an international climate instrument can, years later, become the lever by which a foreign court attempts to redirect a signatory's energy policy. The Senate's advice and consent is not a formality; it is the constitutional check against exactly this kind of downstream entanglement.

What should be done

I cannot speak to the technical particulars of modern energy markets or the engineering of liquefied natural gas, matters that lay beyond the horizon of my own century. What I can say is this: the appropriate response to a legal challenge of this kind is neither reflexive defiance nor anxious capitulation. It is careful construction. The executive should instruct its lawyers to read the relevant treaty text with the precision one would bring to a deed of conveyance. If the obligation is there, honor it or negotiate its revision through lawful means. If it is not there — if a foreign court has overreached — say so plainly, through diplomatic channels, with the measured firmness that public faith requires. Passion is not an argument. The text is.