CURRENT AFFIARS/From the Embassy: A US Foreign Policy Primer: A lone figure paced the railings of the American embassy in Ballsbridge. Four gardaí looked on, not a camera in sight. Like a preacher at Hyde Park Corner chastising the world as it passed by amused and indifferent, he carried his sandwich board with quiet dignity.
"God Bless America" was the message to anyone who would listen. But the Irish at that moment were busy chastising America in the city centre, and the media were busy photographing them.
Could that have been George Dempsey, the former US diplomat, scourge of liberal Ireland since he left the foreign service, and now returned to haunt us? The setting was just right. But it was the wrong man. However the author has indeed returned from his new home in California with a new book for his sandwich board and the same prophetic zeal to rid Ireland of the virus of anti-Americanism.
This is not a memoir, he insists, but his remembering of the shock he encountered when he arrived in Dublin in 1988 colours the essays and papers on a variety of topics which make up this collection. "I was stunned," he writes, "when, but a few weeks after my arrival, I was hit by the sudden realisation that the prevailing attitude in Ireland towards American foreign policy was not the friendly understanding and support I had every right to expect but overtly-expressed contempt."
Dempsey's wrath is not directed at the Irish in general, for whom he professes a genuine affection, but at that combination of journalists, academics and politicians which collectively make up what he terms "the Irish political class" - an amorphous group of "vociferous nutters" which dominates debate on American foreign policy in the country as a whole. Several essays in the book are commentaries on US-related dimensions of international relations in areas where the author served as professional diplomat - Spain after Franco, democracy in Venezuela, US-Soviet relations, the economics of development. Here the Irish virus is exposed in lengthy, footnoted asides which break the flow of narrative and at times give the impression of crankiness. A chapter on American involvement in the peace process in Northern Ireland and a farewell Postscript afford the opportunity to lambast the nutters more directly.
Occasionally the thundering prophet yields to the psalmist, and the stiff, hectoring style gives way to a gentler prose. He has fond memories of his years spent in Madrid observing the transition from Franco to democracy. "What I mostly noticed were the beautiful young Spanish women. There seemed to be an unfair number of them, and all of them flashed smiles when they saw you looking at them. For an American, this was, at least initially, disconcerting. They actually smiled back . . ."
Dempsey's analysis of the process of Spanish democratisation is astute and provides a curious contrast with his approach to other areas of interest addressed in his book. Franco's Spain did not survive in its feudal backwardness because of American support, he writes, nor did democracy owe its birth solely to Franco's death in 1975. Integration within the wider global community had already begun to erode the basis of dictatorship before that event. The Spanish economy and society had already "slipped, by almost imperceptible degrees, into modern Europe".
I think this is interesting and largely correct, though it is a speculative judgment which cannot be proven beyond doubt by recourse to empirical evidence. Dempsey prides himself - repeatedly and at length - on being a stickler for facts, in contrast to the ideologues of the Irish "political class". But there is no set of facts which, of themselves, can demonstrate the validity of his claim about Franco's Spain. It relies for its persuasiveness on a combination of assumptions, theoretical argument, and factual evidence.
No such intellectual imagination is allowed to bear upon his defence of American foreign policy in Venezuela, where he spent an unhappy few years before his retirement in 1998. Where Spain had a past seeping imperceptibly into its politics and culture with the benign cooperation of the United States, which prepared its people for the transition to democracy, Venezuela's corrupt system of government was, for Dempsey, just what Venezuela was - its past as corrupt as its present, an objective fact which the US had to deal with, but which owed nothing of its character to past American corporate and government interests in the region.
His confident denial of American involvement in the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran similarly identifies the problem of democracy as an Iranian difficulty - as if the British, and then the US government, were merely benign observers of foreign corruption. In this case, indeed, Dempsey has got his facts spectacularly wrong. Relying on one outdated source does not make a convincing case for his claim to respect the evidence against the wilful distortions of his "anti-American" opponents. (Stephen Kinzer's recent book, All the Shah's Men, and the documents on which it was based, were freely available for consultation a year ago.)
Leading the nutters who dominate debate on international affairs are The Irish Times (with its "resident moraliser" identified as Fintan O'Toole, its honest broker as Kevin Myers) and RTÉ, whose Morning Ireland bears the brunt of Dempsey's attack.
What these organs of the media cannot accept is the self-evident truth hammered home incessantly by the author: "The United States is, in most every aspect of human endeavour with global import, the one indispensable nation, and Europeans just can't stand it".
Those who know George Dempsey only from his writings and media appearances will know little of the seductive warmth and charm which he deploys in his personal relations with friends and acquaintances. Ireland needs its watchdogs, its whistle-blowers, its Old Testament prophets. A little more of the charm and less of the pit bull terrier would have made this a more persuasive and enduring tract.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College, Dublin
From the Embassy: A US Foreign Policy Primer By G.T. Dempsey Open Republic Institute, 257pp. €19.95