1Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which would end the Mexican-American War, was the result of insubordination. President Polk had ordered Nicholas Trist of the State Department to terminate negotiations. Trist disobeyed, believing a breakthrough was imminent. Polk had no choice but to accept.
2. In 1939, Turkey signed a Mutual Aid Pact with the United Kingdom and France but backed out at the last minute to avoid war with the USSR. They later signed a friendship treaty with Nazi Germany in 1941.
3. Florida has an agreement with Canada which allows Canadians to pay in-state tuition rather than out-of-state tuition for all 40 state-funded colleges and universities.
4. The Bureau of Indian Affairs still sends bolts of cloth every year to New York Indian tribes as part of the debt owed from the Treaty of Canandaigua of 1794.
5. United States leases the land beneath the Guantanamo Bay detention facility from Cuba for $4,085 per year. The agreement was made after the Spanish-American War. Since taking power in 1959, the Cuban communist government has consistently protested against the U.S. presence on Cuban soil and refuses to cash the checks sent by USA.
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6Treaty of San Francisco
Some people have argued that USA legally holds sovereignty over Taiwan due to the Treaty of San Francisco, which was signed at the end of World War II. In 2006, a group of Taiwanese residents unsuccessfully filed a complaint asking for Taiwanese residents to receive US Constitutional rights for this reason.
7. The 1928 Pact of Paris is an international agreement that outlawed war. The period after its signing saw a significant decline in conflicts around the globe, though it didn't stop World War 2.
8. The Treaty of Amritsar was executed by the British East India Company and Raja Gulab Singh of Jammu in 1846 after the First Anglo-Sikh War. This treaty established the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir. Article 10 of the treaty required the Maharaja to send three pairs of Kashmiri shawls to be given to Queen Victoria.
9. In 1440, a land sale treaty between the Pope and Florence accidentally left out a small strip of land around Cospaia. The people of the area promptly declared their independence and remained sovereign for nearly 400 years.
10. The Anglo-American Loan Agreement was a post World War 2 loan given to the UK by the United States and Canada to keep the British economy afloat. The loan was for $3.75 billion at a low 2% interest rate and Canada loaned an additional US$1.19 billion. It was only fully paid off on December 29, 2006.
11Gandhi Irwin Pact
Mahatama Gandhi modeled his Dandi march from the Boston tea party. He always quoted the American struggle for independence in his speeches. He even flavored his tea with salt, while signing Gandhi Irwin Pact to commemorate the influence of the Boston Tea Party in his satyagraha.
12. Aug 23, 1989 commemorated the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact between Hitler and Stalin, which had paved the way for the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States. On this day, 2 million people (25% of the population) formed a chain across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania seeking independence from USSR. Within 6 months, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to declare independence.
13. America's oldest, unbroken treaty relationship is with Morocco, which was the first nation to recognize the US. The Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship was signed by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Sultan Muhammad III in 1786.
14. In 1943, Winston Churchill called upon the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373 to allow the English Navy to lease ports in neutral Portugal. This gave England access to the Azores Islands and helped change the Battle of the Atlantic.
15. The ‘Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia’ refers to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by the four signatories of Warsaw Pact who were USSR, Poland, Bulgaria and Hungary. During the invasion, Czech citizens removed or defaced all street signs except for those giving the direction back to Moscow.
16Treaty Of Canandaigua
The Article 6 under the ‘Treaty of Canandaigua’ signed between the USA and the Iroquois in 1794 requires the USA to provide $4500 in goods every year to them. It is honored to this day, but Article 2 under this treaty which was laid to protect the land of the Oneida was mostly ignored and their land fell from 6,000,000 acres to just 32 acres in 1920.
17. After Soviet Russia signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939, USSR invaded and annexed Poland. Under the “secret protocol” of this pact, Poland was divided into "spheres of influence" between these two powers. USSR claimed they invaded Poland to protect the Ukrainians and Belarusians who lived in the eastern part of Poland.
18. During World War 2, due to the Japan-Soviet neutrality pact, US aid to the Soviet port of Vladivostok (the Pacific Route) was carried by Soviet-Flagged ships only and was mostly left alone by the Japanese military. It thus became the safest path for military aid from the USA to the USSR.
19. From Nov 1969 to Jun 1971, a Native American group occupied and held Alcatraz Island, claiming that, under the Treaty of Fort Laramie between the U.S. and the Lakota tribe, all retired, abandoned, or out-of-use federal land was to be returned to the Indians who once occupied it.
20. Japan proposed an amendment to the Treaty of Versailles that outlawed all racial discrimination. Despite receiving a majority vote for it to be added to the treaty, Woodrow Wilson personally vetoed the measure and as a comprise let Japan claim several islands in the Pacific.
21The TRIPS Agreement
The current global framework of intellectual property protection, the TRIPS Agreement, went into effect in 1995. Before the agreement, national governments had divergent standards of what was patentable. India did not allow drugs to be patented, which is one reason it is a center of generic drug manufacturers.
22. The Cherokee and other Southeast Native American nations known as the Five Civilized Tribes held African-American slaves as workers and property. In 1866 they signed a treaty that freed them and granted them and their descendants, tribal citizenship after Emancipation. Since 1980s, however, the Cherokee Nation has ostracized them and is trying to strip them of tribal citizenship largely due to their darker complexion.
23. Environmental Modification Convention is an international treaty signed in 1977 which bans controlling the weather as a weapon of war. During the Vietnam War, the USA carried out Operation Popeye, a "cloud-seeding" mission to stimulate clouds in Vietnam to increase rainfall and lengthen the monsoon season. After the operation was declassified in 1974, the United Nations passed this resolution.
24. Benito Mussolini signed Vatican City into existence. The 1929 Lateran Treaty ended the dispute between the Italian government & the Catholic Church, which allowed the Vatican to exist as its own sovereign state and compensated the church $92 million (> $1 billion today) for the Papal states.
25. Slaveholders in the US knew that enslaved people were escaping to Mexico, the U.S. tried to get Mexico to sign a fugitive slave treaty, but Mexico refused to sign such a treaty, insisting that all enslaved people were free once they set foot on Mexican soil.
