(December 28, 2011 at 11:27 am)Chuck Wrote: That's cloud coo coo land legalistic fantasy.
There is almost no circumstance in which some nation is not both capable of, and actually is, telling other nation what they can and can not. Whenever a country one wants country two to do something, and has the wherewithal to make it unpleasant if the country two doesn't do it, country one can and most often will, tell country two to do something. Much of times when two countries are in this situation, everyone knows it and there is no need for country one to verbalized it and country two will do it unbidden.
I understood "tell another nation what they can and cannot do" to mean literal wording to that effect, whether by some legal decree or some action of force (i.e. a trade blockade is set up until the nation does X or Y). Of course, there are plenty of ways in which nations can assert some degree of "control" over other nations without expressly saying it. The entire Cold War played out to this effect, with both sides having the capability to destroy one another, yet neither doing so since it would lead to their own destruction.
A treaty is a legal document that is a literal way for some nation to tell another nation how to behave. The point here was that Iran signed a treaty saying they would not develop nuclear warheads, and they appear to be trying to break that treaty.
