Bartlet gives a speech to the Global Defense Council, a fictional environmental lobby group that was central to the plot of The American President (1995), also written by Aaron Sorkin.
CJ (Allison Janney)'s fishbowl has a missile half buried in blue rocks that look like the ocean. A background story is about a missile defense shield that failed and the missile landed in the ocean.
The fictional arson the characters discuss is a reference to the 1998 arson of a Vail Ski Resort development, carried out by the Earth Liberation Front. The ELF was considered, at the time, to be the largest domestic terrorist threat in the United States.
When Bartlet finally does the credentials ceremony to make Lord John Marbury the British Ambassador to the U.S., he says, "John, let me explain why you've been waiting. I have to see people in the order in which they arrive, and you got beat by Argentina." This may have been a sly reference to the 1982 Falklands War, in which Argentine military forces invaded and laid claim to the British-owned Falkland Islands (which lie off the southern Argentine coast).
Marbury (Roger Rees) is presented to the President as the ambassador from Great Britain instead of the ambassador from the United Kingdom.