Cite as: 539 U. S. 396 (2003)
Opinion of the Court
here had expressly preempted laws like HVIRA, the issue would be straightforward. See Belmont, supra, at 327, 331; Pink, supra, at 223, 230-231. But petitioners and the United States as amicus curiae both have to acknowledge that the agreements include no preemption clause, and so leave their claim of preemption to rest on asserted interference with the foreign policy those agreements embody. Reliance is placed on our decision in Zschernig v. Miller, 389 U. S. 429 (1968).
Zschernig dealt with an Oregon probate statute prohibiting inheritance by a nonresident alien, absent showings that the foreign heir would take the property "without confiscation" by his home country and that American citizens would enjoy reciprocal rights of inheritance there. Id., at 430-431. Two decades earlier, Clark v. Allen, 331 U. S. 503 (1947), had held that a similar California reciprocity law "did not on its face intrude on the federal domain," Zschernig, supra, at 432, but by the time Zschernig (an East German resident) brought his challenge, it was clear that the Oregon law in practice had invited "minute inquiries concerning the actual administration of foreign law," 389 U. S., at 435, and so was providing occasions for state judges to disparage certain foreign regimes, employing the language of the anti-Communism prevalent here at the height of the Cold War, see id., at 440 (the Oregon law had made "unavoidable judicial criticism of nations established on a more authoritarian basis than our own"). Although the Solicitor General, speaking for the State Department, denied that the state statute "unduly interfere[d] with the United States' conduct of foreign relations," id., at 434 (internal quotation marks omitted), the Court was not deterred from exercising its own judgment to invalidate the law as an "intrusion by the State into the field of foreign affairs which the Constitution entrusts to the President and the Congress," id., at 432.
"like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution." Id., at 320.
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