Frenemies

Last week’s U.S.-EU annual summit differed from its predecessors in ways that fuel the perception on the other side of the Atlantic that Barack Obama is just not that interested in Europe. First, there was the venue of the opening lunch: Blair House, the government’s official guest house, not the usual White House. Then, there was the luncheon’s host: Vice-President Joe Biden, not the president himself. And, finally, there was the time frame for discussion: European leaders only got 90 minutes of direct talks with the president instead of the customary two hours (minimum), plus a press conference.

According to European Union sources, EU commission president Jose Manuel Barroso was so furious at what Brussels considered a downgrading of the summit that, at one point, he threatened not to attend the lunch at all.

This all feeds into what The New York Times calls “an underlying disaffection” between the Obama administration and America’s oldest and most trusted allies. Last Monday, The Guardian sniped, “Obama’s apparent lack of interest in America’s European allies--some call it indifference, even disdain--is a source of growing unease on the Old World side of the Atlantic.”

The general lines of the argument are that Washington feels Europeans haven’t strongly enough supported Obama’s foreign priorities; notably, that they haven’t sent more troops to Afghanistan and that they haven’t been more amenable to housing former Guantanamo detainees. Dissatisfied Europeans, on the other hand, think the administration’s actions and policies are frequently hard to read--scrapping the planned U.S. anti-missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic in September was a case in point--and that Washington has dragged its feet on concerns such as climate change and the Middle East (backtracking on Israeli settlement expansion.)

But it goes deeper than that. The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) summed up an influential new report thusly: “An unsentimental President Obama has lost patience with a Europe lacking coherence and purpose.” According to the report, Obama’s first EU-U.S. summit, in Prague last April, left the president incredulous. “To Americans, these summits are all too typical of the European love of process over substance, and a European compulsion for everyone to crowd into the room regardless of efficiency,” the report says.

The 71-page report also charges that Europe has a “fetishist” obsession with how it is viewed in the United States. Its two writers, Nick Witney, a former British diplomat, and Jeremy Shapiro, a foreign policy analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, say that while the United States is focused on seeking pragmatic new alliances with emerging powers such as China, Europe is still psychologically wedded to its Cold War dependence on the trans-Atlantic connection