In Claim 4, one of several in Case No. Bl before the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal, claimant, the Islamic Republic of Iran, sought to recover from the United States possession of certain military equipment that had been sold to Iran pursuant to contracts forming part of the U.S. “Foreign Military Sales” (FMS) program. In the alternative, Iran sought compensation from the United States in the amount of U.S. $143,290,948, plus interest, for the alleged replacement value of the property at issue. In this partial award, the Full Tribunal held: that the United States was not obliged to deliver the equipment and that Iran’s request for specific performance must be denied, but that the United States was still required to compensate Iran for the value of the properties as of March 26, 1981, the date the United States communicated its decision not to permit their export to Iran. The Tribunal did not make an award of damages at this stage, since neither party had provided evidence as to the value of the goods on that date. American Arbitrators Howard H. Holtzmann and Charles N. Brower each filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in pArt. The three Iranian arbitrators concurred in the award, but without filing an opinion.

Resolved, That the committee adopts as the basis for consideration of the subject referred to it, the Acts and Resolutions of the Second Peace Conference at The Hague in the year 1907.

That the provisions of the several plans for an International Court of Justice already elaborated by representative jurists of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, be laid before the committee and considered as the subjects to which they respectively relate, are taken up for consideration.

When Count Mouravieff, at the order of the Emperor of Russia, convoked the first peace conference by the circular of the 12th/24th August, 1898, hardly any one foresaw the importance which this first move was to take, which seemed then in the opinion of the writer Mommsen like “ a printer’s error in the history of the world.”

In order to realize the extent of the development to which coming periodical peace conferences are destined it is sufficient to examine the facts of yesterday and the road already traversed.

The object of the first Russian project was very limited; its purpose was to call together a certain number of Powers to study the possibility of “ putting a limit ” on armament for the purpose of diminishing the financial burdens of the states, but the exchanges of opinion which preceded the assembly of these “ disarmament conferences ” having shown that the chances of success were very feeble, a second circular by Mouravieff (January 11, 1899) extended the first program by attaching thereto particularly “the possibility of preventing armed conflicts by pacific means ” and the reduction of “ the laws and customs of war ” to a system of rules. These two new subjects changed the character of the assembly, the title of which even was modified. It was called thenceforth the “ Peace Conference.” And, in fact, the conference in obedience to the very force of things soon completed the transformation of accession to principle, subordinated the premature question of disarmament, and applied its efforts towards justifying its title by concentrating all its force on the matter of pacific adjustment of international conflicts.

As the chairman of the panel at the 1985 ASIL Annual Meeting on the question “May the President Violate Customary International Law?” I must confess that the issue that originally troubled me when I suggested this topic for discussion remains securely hidden in the shadows of the debate. Yet I think it is of central importance. The reason it has remained obscure, despite its significance, is that it is an extraordinarily difficult intellectual puzzle. My brief purpose here is to bring it into the light, not to try to solve it.

Eastern Europe is at the present moment in such a condition of unstable equilibrium and fermentation that it can not be known whether this abnormal state of affairs can end in peace or in war. The map of the East, so carefully prepared by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, is hardly more than a memory. The state of conventional law which resulted, having been decreed in an arbitrary manner, could only be artificial; and being sustained solely by the balancing of the forces of the Eastern States, it had to be modified according to circumstances, thus furnishing a new illustration of the importance of the harsh rule of interpretation of treaties known as the clause “ rebus sic stantibus.” The sudden happenings of 1908 have for their remote but certain cause the war in Manchuria, that grave political blunder of St. Petersburg. Held in check upon the Bosphorus by England, supplanted little by little at Constantinople by German influence, Russia, modifying the line of policy which she had constantly followed since the testament, spurious or genuine, but undoubtedly realistic of Peter the Great, thought to find in the extreme East an outlet for her political and territorial ambitions. There she disclosed her own military weakness rather than the strength of her adversary, and suffered the annihilation of her political influence in Europe. Even the Western balance of power was affected. France lost Morocco; and as for the Eastern balance of power, it no longer exists, and the kingdom of Servia has lost the reason for its existence. It is through the sudden displacement of the two sides of the scales into which Russia and Austria had thrown the weight of their swords that the Eastern upheaval was created.