He must simply sign a treaty, finalized in Rome in 1998, to create a permanent International Criminal Court.
Since Mr. Obama took office, the two countries have signed the New Start arms control treaty, finalized a civilian nuclear cooperation pact, agreed on tougher sanctions against Iran and greatly expanded the American supply route to Afghanistan through former Soviet territory.
The Moon Treaty, finalized in 1979, declared that any resources from space should be shared among all nations, but most countries, including the United States, never signed or ratified it.
The treaty, finalized in July by negotiators representing 120 of the 193 United Nations members, offered a stark contrast to the threats of mutual nuclear annihilation raised in the bombastic exchanges between North Korea's regime and the Trump administration in recent weeks.
The treaty, finalized by representatives of 122 countries meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, also spells out a process to put more chemicals on the black list.
The series of meetings, scheduled to take place Geneva in January, will be the fifth, and potentially final, round of discussions before the treaty is finalized among participating nations.
That treaty was finalized in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, after years of negotiations, and it went into force in 2005.
The third treaty was finalized in 1988 and represents an escalation of the war on drugs, which was launched by Richard Nixon in 1972.
But before the treaty was finalized in 1997, the United States led a push to replace the enforcement mechanism -- a fine for missing reduction targets paid into a clean development fund -- with a market mechanism meant to lower the cost of compliance for polluting companies.
By clamping down on power plant emissions, Obama is also working to increase his leverage and credibility with other nations whose commitments he's seeking for a global climate treaty to be finalized later this year in Paris.
