Five years later, in the “Usa” / 494 cases, the Court adopted these principles another case concerning the attribution and recognition of the Soviet government by Litvinov. The question was whether the United States had the right to recover the assets of the New York branch of a Russian insurance company. The company argued that the Soviet government`s forfeiture decrees did not apply to its property in New York and could not apply in contradiction to the U.S. and New York Constitutions. The court, which was decided by Justice Douglas, brushed aside these arguments. An official statement from the Russian government itself resolved the issue of the extraterritorial operation of the Russian nationalization decree and was binding on the US courts. The power to remove such barriers to full recognition of the rights of our nationals is “a modest tacit power of the president, who is “the only organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” It was the verdict of the political department that the full recognition of the Soviet government required the resolution of outstanding problems, including the claims of our nationals. We would take over the executive function if we felt that the court decision was not final and conclusive. . . . In the United States, executive agreements are made exclusively by the President of the United States. They are one of three mechanisms through which the United States makes binding international commitments.
Some authors view executive agreements as treaties of international law because they bind both the United States and another sovereign state. However, under U.S. constitutional law, executive agreements are not considered treaties within the meaning of the contractual clause of the U.S. Constitution, which requires the Council and the approval of two-thirds of the Senate to be considered a treaty. The executive agreement achieved its modern development as an instrument of foreign policy under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and sometimes threatened to replace contractual power, not formally, but in fact, as a determining element in the field of foreign policy. The first significant use of the executive agreement by the President took the form of an exchange of notes on 16 November 1933 with Maxim M. Litvinov, the foreign commissioner of the USSR, with the extension of American recognition to the Soviet Union and certain commitments made by each official.481 A treaty is an international agreement concluded in writing and governed by international law between two or more sovereign states.
, whether they are used in a single instrument or in two or more related instruments.