ANALYSIS: Obama's summit decision leaves EU a mountain to climb

Feb 3, 2010, 10:35 GMT

   Brussels - It takes a lot of preparation to climb to a summit: that was the perceived message from the United States to the European Union after the White House said that US President Barack Obama would not attend a planned EU-US summit in Madrid in May.

   Analysts say that the EU remains an important potential partner for the US, but that Washington will only take it seriously if its 27 member states can give the US substantial support on key issues such as financial reform or the war in Afghanistan.

Obama 'would like to have good relations with Europe, but if Europe wants to be taken seriously as a partner ... the EU should look to the substance,' said Anthony Dworkin, senior policy fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations (ECFR) think tank.

Ever since 1997, the leaders of the EU and the US have held summits once a year in a symbol of their 'strategic relationship.'

On December 1, the EU brought into force the Lisbon Treaty, which aims to give the bloc more global clout by creating a full-time EU president to work alongside its rotating national presidency.

Spain, which took over the rotating presidency in January, had scheduled the next EU-US summit for May 24. That meeting was set to be chaired by the new EU president, Herman Van Rompuy.

But on Monday, White House officials said that Obama had no plans to go to Spain, a blow to the EU's dream of global influence.

'Obama's decision indicates that the US has little confidence that the EU can meet this ambition,' said Joerg Forbrig, senior researcher at the German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF), a trans- Atlantic think tank based in Berlin.

According to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, the decision not to attend the summit is simply a matter of timing.

'People have busy schedules, and Mr Obama has been to Europe a lot,' European Commission spokesman Michael Mann said on Tuesday.

But analysts said that it stems from far deeper problems.

The first is what is perceived in the US as a European failure to offer more than token support on key issues such as climate change or the artificially low value of China's currency.

'It's no longer about what can the US do for us (in Europe), it's about what can we do together, and the US is becoming increasingly disappointed with what Europe can deliver,' said Tomas Valasek, head of foreign policy and defence studies at the Centre for European Reform think tank in London.

That has been reinforced by the confusion in the EU as to who should run the May summit, with Van Rompuy - officially its chairman - apparently left on the sidelines by the meeting's Spanish planners.

'The institutional confusion over who should host and chair the summit ... gives the impression that it was a summit for the sake of having a summit, not one which would lead to concrete results,' Dworkin said.

Finally, Obama's own busy schedule highlights the EU's plight: this year alone, he is set to attend summits of major international groups such as the G8 (June), the G20 (June and November), the UN (September) and NATO (November).

That gives him ample opportunity to discuss specific problems with any EU leaders he needs - without having to spend time at a summit where the bloc is unlikely, on past showing, to offer what he wants.

'In terms of the big issues on the agenda ... the EU is not a big part of the solution,' Valasek pointed out.

And that puts the pressure on the EU to come up with ways in which it, as a body, can give the US real help - or risk seeing its coveted summits vanish into the clouds of a mountain it could not climb.

'Europe can only hope to get attention, and the participation of Obama in a US-EU summit, if Washington sees a benefit in engaging with Europe,' Forbrig said.

'I would not even rule out that the planned EU-US summit falters altogether - perhaps even that this decision ends the tradition of regular EU-US summits,' he said.