The entire world has a vested interest in what happens to and within the United States. It has a vested interest in what happens to and about the most powerful political and military figure in the world, the President of the United States. And we in Ireland have a special interest in what happens to this President because of the crucial role he has played in the peace settlement and its maintenance.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the world looks askance as the American political system has been derailed by an issue of enormous triviality: whether President Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky and whether he lied about it. And meanwhile very many great issues, directly within the influence of the President, are ignored.
Yesterday morning the New York Times carried a story headed "Russia and France gain on US lead in arms sales, study says". This reported that the United States retained its No 1 position in the arms trade by selling $15.2 billion worth of weapons last year. Russia and France tied for second place. This was according to a Congressional Research Service report.
The report said Saudi Arabia bought arms worth $1.1 billion last year, Taiwan $0.93 billion, with Egypt, Iran and Kuwait the next-highest arms purchasers.
In the last four years the US has sold to Middle Eastern countries 116 supersonic aircraft, 1,358 surface-to-air missiles, 1,332 tanks and self-propelled guns and 72 helicopters. Since 1990, the Congressional Research Service report said, the United States delivered $53 billion worth of weapons to the developing world.
Last June the New York Times reported that while the US government sales of tanks and jet fighters has declined since the end of the Cold War, the private US arms trade is booming. According to government records, private arms shipments have risen from $2 billion to $3 billion during the Cold War to $25 billion in 1996.
The trade in small arms is even more brisk, but the statistics on this element of the business are sparse. The United Nations Under-Secretary for General Disarmament, Jayantha Dhanapala, said: "Available in abundance, cheap to buy, requiring little training to use, small arms have become the weapons of choice for the present-day conflicts fought mostly in the streets by irregular troops in violation of accepted standards of international law".
Surely the world has a vested interest in how the United States is directly arming to the teeth unsavoury regimes throughout the world and is indirectly contributing to the mass slaughter in conflicts throughout the globe?
In one of these present-day conflicts last Sunday Hutu rebels massacred more than 100 civilians in Rwanda.
In neighbouring Congo, formerly Zaire, there has been a renewal of the civil war over the last week. Hundreds of people have been killed there in the last few days. The conflict has the potential to devastate the second-largest and most populous state in Africa and to spread into several neighbouring states, including Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Angola.
A president who was relatively focused in 1994 and who ignored entirely the genocide in Rwanda could hardly now be expected to notice what is now happening in this part of Africa.
Meanwhile, without any debate whatever, the United States is gearing up to commit a brazen violation of international law in a supposed humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. Last Monday the US State Department spokesman, Mr James Rubin, said "NATO has now approved a range of contingency plans for the use of military force [in regard to Kosovo]".
Apparently NATO believes that whatever it decides to do militarily is OK: the requirement of sanction from the UN Security Council is unnecessary. And this is in relation to an intervention in the internal affairs of an internationally recognised sovereign state, Yugoslavia.
And yet the United States political system is so obsessed with the Lewinsky affair that it does not notice or does not care about this planned outrage. There are a few other issues:
Up to 80 people have been killed in clashes in Kashmir between the two new nuclear powers, Pakistan and India, in the last few days.
The Russian economy is in a tailspin in spite of the $22.6 billion IMF rescue package. Russia has 20,000 nuclear weapons. It has an impoverished arms industry and is willing to sell weapons to anybody. The states of the Russian Federation, a great many of them possessing nuclear weapons, are teetering on the verge of disintegration, with unknowable consequences to the world security.
The Asian economies are in chaos. On Monday the government in Hong Kong reported that its economy had shrunk by 2.8 per cent in the first quarter of 1998 and is headed into its deepest recession since 1945. There is mounting apprehension that the new government in Japan may be shrinking from the measures necessary to rescue it and the Asian economies from collapse. The impact of such a collapse on the United States and, inevitably, on the rest of the world, would be enormous.
There is a newly emerging crisis between Iraq and the United Nations over the failure of the UN to lift sanctions on Iraq as seemed to be promised and Iraq's new refusal to co-operate with the UN monitoring team.
The peace process in the Middle East is disintegrating, largely because of the refusal of the US to confront the obduracy of the right-wing Israeli government. Arab states are cosying up to Iran, which is busily arming itself.
All these issues, as well as the internal issues within the US, now apparently take second place to whether DNA tests will show that President Clinton's semen is on a dress owned by Monica Lewinsky.
Washington society is awash with rumours that the O.J. Simpson trial celebrity, Mr Mark Fuhrman, was consulted on whether a semen trace would be detected on the dress; that there were incriminating notes, love letters and emails on Ms Lewinsky's home computer; that the independent prosecutor has more than 75 photographs of President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky together (all of these are taken from the latest Drudge report).
It is one thing for us, members of the public, to be intrigued by salacious gossip. But for the political system of the most powerful nation in the world to be transfixed by such trivia is something else.
That a president should be judged on whether he had sex with an intern and lied about it, rather than on his management of the urgent international issues, including the state of the peace settlement in Northern Ireland, is an expression of contempt for the rest of the world.