opinions between Secretary of War Taft, then in the Far East, and
Count Katsura, amounting to a secret treaty, by which the Roosevelt
administration assented to the establishment by Japan of a military
protectorate in Korea.[234] Three years later Secretary of State Root
and the Japanese ambassador at Washington entered into the Root-Takahira
Agreement to uphold the status quo in the Pacific and maintain the
principle of equal opportunity for commerce and industry in China.[235]
Meantime, in 1907, by a "Gentlemen's Agreement," the Mikado's government
had agreed to curb the emigration of Japanese subjects to the United
States, thereby relieving the Washington government from the necessity
of taking action that would have cost Japan loss of face. The final of
this series of executive agreements touching American relations in and
with the Far East was the product of President Wilson's diplomacy. This
was the Lansing-Ishii Agreement, embodied in an exchange of letters
dated November 2, 1917, by which the United States recognized Japan's
"special interests" in China, and Japan assented to the principle of the
Open Door in that country.[236]

THE INTERNATIONAL OBLIGATION OF EXECUTIVE AGREEMENTS

The question naturally suggests itself: What sort of obligation does an
agreement of the above description impose upon the United States? The
question was put to Secretary Lansing himself in 1918 by a member of the
Foreign Relations Committee, as follows: "Has the so-called
Lansing-Ishii Agreement any binding force on this country?" and replied
that it had not; that it was simply a declaration of American policy so
long as the President or State Department might choose to continue
it.[237] Actually, it took the Washington Conference of 1921, two solemn
treaties and an exchange of notes to get rid of it; while the
"Gentlemen's Agreement," first drawn in 1907, was finally put an end to,
after seventeen years, only by an act of Congress.[238] That executive
agreements are sometimes cognizable by the courts was indicated
earlier. The matter is further treated immediately below.

THE LITVINOV AGREEMENT OF 1933

The executive agreement attained its fullest development as an
instrument of foreign policy under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, even
at times threatening to replace the treaty-making power, if not formally
yet actually, as a determinative element in the field of foreign policy.
Mr. Roosevelt's first important utilization o