Abstract: Over the last six decades, a handful of multilateral treaties have been concluded with the view to regulating and protecting foreign investment. These legal instruments, however, leave a significant aspect of foreign investment unprotected. The history of the international investment regime shows that there has been no consensus between capital-supplying nations and capital-recipient nations in making these multilateral investment treaties complete and adequate. Besides, a glance at the development of the international investment regime shows that such consensus is absent even among capital-supplying countries themselves. The trend is that the existing gap in the field of the international investment law is unlikely to be bridged by a comprehensive multilateral investment agreement that encompasses the majority of the 191 sovereign states. Instead, the protection of foreign investment is likely to come from the direction of the ever-growing bilateral and regional investment treaties, and regional trade arrangements.