D. Can’t solve EU advantage. Foreign governments don’t trust the CP.

It still might be supposed that courts roving about enforcing an expanding body of international legal norms might be especially dangerous in the American context because of the unusually high levels of independence and power that U.S. courts enjoy as a coequal and (on some accounts) unaccountable branch. The potential for courts to derange the nation's foreign policy might seem to be commensurately greater. But it is far from clear that this is so. True, the structure of governmental power and the extensive autonomy of courts in the United States may still seem exotic and hard to imagine in much of the world, especially in China and many of the other authoritarian regimes that have been the foci of human rights litigation. But that does not mean that foreign governments and their leaders fail to comprehend the U.S. structure. It does not mean that they view court decisions as of a piece with U.S. foreign policy as articulated by the executive branch or Congress because they see courts as agents of the political branches (as they arguably are in China and many ATCA target countries). Nor does it mean that they view judicial opinions as on par with legislative or presidential pronouncements because they view courts as the equal of the political branches in foreign policy (as a highly simplistic version of American constitutional law and politics might suggest). Indeed, these two imaginable foreign views of U.S. courts are contradictory. Moreover, there is considerable evidence that the PRC has a reasonably accurate and sophisticated understanding of U.S. separation of powers principles. In these circumstances, it is unwarranted and unwise - and would unnecessarily constrain and [*546] undermine the political branches' conduct of foreign policy - to accept at face value statements from foreign governments (including notably China) that exaggerate opportunistically their incomprehension of U.S. separation of powers law, and that express shock and offense at judicial decisions (or, for that matter, congressional expressions of opinion that do not become law) and that purport to construe them as expressions of the foreign policy positions of the American government. 211