In foreign policy, Bush emphasized American freedom of action, unrestrained by international treaties and institutions. During the 2000 campaign, he had criticized the Clinton administration’s penchant for “nation-building”— American assistance in creating stable governments in chaotic parts of the world. Once in office, Bush announced plans to push ahead with a national missile defense system (another inheritance from the Reagan era) even though this required American withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which barred the deployment of such systems. He repudiated a treaty establishing an International Criminal Court to try violators of human rights, fearing that it would assert its jurisdiction over Americans. Critics charged that Bush was resuming the tradition of American isolationism, which had been abandoned after World War II.
To great controversy, the Bush administration announced that it would not abide by the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which sought to combat global warming—a slow rise in the earth’s temperature that scientists warned could have disastrous effects on the world’s climate. Global warming is caused when gases released by burning fossil fuels such as coal and oil remain in the upper atmosphere, trapping heat reflected from the earth. Evidence of this development first surfaced in the 1990s, when scientists studying layers of ice in Greenland concluded that the earth’s temperature had risen significantly during the past century. Further investigations revealed that areas of the Antarctic once under ice had become covered by grass, and that glaciers across the globe are retreating.
Today, most scientists consider global warming a serious situation. Climate change threatens to disrupt long-established patterns of agriculture, and the melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps because of rising temperatures may raise ocean levels and flood coastal cities.
By the time Bush took office, some 180 nations, including the United States, had agreed to accept the goals set in the Kyoto Protocol for reducing the output of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels. Since the United States burns far more fossil fuel than any other nation, Bushs repudiation of the treaty, on the grounds that it would weaken the American economy, infuriated much of the world, as well as environmentalists at home.