It was the inimitable cartoon character Mr Dooley who declared: "The further ye get fr'm any period the better ye can write about it. Ye are not subject to interruptions by people that were there." Distance can be measured spatially as well as temporally. It was my fortune (good, bad or indifferent) to spend a year in Washington DC when history was being made in the North.
When the Good Friday agreement was being signed I was on Captiva Island watching the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. It was a spectacular sight which drew large crowds as if following an ancient rite of sun worship. The contrast with Belfast could not have been more striking. CNN delivered pictures of dark and sodden skies, of Arctic weather and of negotiators at the point of exhaustion. The climatic conditions suggested crucifixion; it was the sunshine smile of the genial George Mitchell that heralded resurrection.
For one who had been there from the beginning and had witnessed Northern events unfold over three decades it was strange to see it from afar. At that distance it is impossible to be emotionally engaged. The glowering pessimism of a long-term, low-intensity conflict had been replaced by the up-and-at-'em optimism of a booming US economy.
My research - examining the relationship between official and unofficial diplomacy - called for operating under different time-frames and mind-sets. If one indicator of a stable political system is a sense of predictability, a quiet confidence that the future would look after itself, then Belfast lacked it and middle America had it in bucketfuls.
The Clinton administration was quick off the mark in recognising the nature of what had been achieved. It was careful not to claim full credit but the fact remains that this was about its only major foreign policy success to date, a fact compounded by its (over)reaction to the bombs in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam later in the summer. Here were the two extremes of American foreign policy. The Belfast Agreement was an example of what Joseph Nye has called "soft power" - the "ability to set the agenda in ways which shape the preferences of others" - which "strengthens American diplomacy through attraction rather that coercion". It worked on the assumption that negotiated agreements will work only if they have the support of publics at home and abroad.
None of this was evident in Africa in August (nor in Iraq in more recent days). Here was the world's one remaining super-power demonstrating its superior technology with a vengeance. The resort to coercion was a conventional response. But it reopened the debate about America's position in the world, in the aftermath of the creation and collapse of the New World Order. Americans perceived their role as a combination of night watchman and moral compass. Khartoum and Afghanistan forced them to reconsider the complexities of patrolling the world on their own. Our own little conflict had to find its place somewhere in this hierarchy of responsibilities. The effect of working in the middle of this hothouse atmosphere is that a sense of detachment is induced - although we might deceive ourselves that we are acquiring a sharper perspective.
Detachment is imposed in adapting to this new environment. Washington is a serious and exhausting city. Information is a valuable commodity and there are those who chase it relentlessly. I shouldn't have been so surprised when my host at a Georgetown dinner asked me to leave a few minutes aside to lead a discussion on the Northern Ireland conflict - and this on Thanksgiving. A few minutes translated into two hours. Would such things happen in Dublin 4 on Christmas Day?
One soon realises that this is one of the most self-obsessed points on the plant. The Obituaries page of the Washington Post presents a morbid example. The dominant segment offers obituaries of local notables (and, to the Post's credit, not so notables); the remainder are corralled around the section "Deaths Elsewhere". Little outside the Beltway matters. Perhaps that explains why such a sophisticated system is in constitutional gridlock, brought on by an essentially tawdry affair that has brought credit to no one.
It is good for the soul to indulge in others' obsessions. It places our own in some perspective. It is perfectly understandable that so much attention is devoted to America's place in the world. Admittedly, this is among the chattering classes. The level of general interest is so low that one prominent commentator has written of "hubris and fragmentation".
It is, frankly, inconceivable that the Lewinsky affair has put virtually everything else on hold. One of the more insidious domestic problems remains race relations. And 35 years after the ground-breaking Supreme Court decision Brown v the Board of Education of Topeka, which outlawed racial segregation, it was a shock to discover the level of residential segregation which exists even in the leafy glades of suburban USA. No one doubts President Clinton's bona fides in this matter. The fact that more has not been achieved remains a blight on American politics. It reminds us of Machiavelli's warning that there is nothing "more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things".
The new political order is discovering that at Stormont. They are learning that it is imperative to establish realistic expectations about how a tentative peace agreement can be moved on. But not all of them seem to have appreciated that the game has changed, that the language and behaviour of the past is not appropriate to the provisional agreement. They need to redefine and revise their interests and to accelerate the joint learning process. They may not appreciate this advice from one who confesses to semi-detachment.
But the American sojourn was not entirely wasted. It reinforced what we already know. American commitment is deep, it is benign and it is resilient. Despite all his domestic problems this US President will not run away from the issue. He has created the conditions for an abiding bipartisanship which will extend beyond his presidency. He personifies the degree to which the issue has been internationalised. Whether we desire it or not we are not returning to the dreary steeples. In any case there is no evidence that we want to return to that sense of fatalism. The one real sea change I have detected on my return is a desire on the ground for this to succeed.
Mr Dooley was writing about history. In similar vein Bertolt Brecht satirised the East German leaders who wanted to abolish the people because they disagreed with them. The people will not be abolished and they will continue to interrupt. Much better to accept this reality than to cling to the politics of procrastination.
Paul Arthur is a lecturer in politics at the University of Ulster
