Obama Passes By

Rather than its own errors, it is Washington’s shifting priorities that are marginalizing the E.U.

The foreign ministry could hardly have imagined, when it announced Barack Obama’s presence in Spain on the occasion of the E.U. presidential elections, that domestic problems in the U.S. would make them call off the visit. Much less would Leire Pajín, secretary of the Socialist Workers’ Party, have suspected when he spoke of the “planetary alliance” between Zapatero and Obama, that he would be the first U.S. president in 10 years to miss a transatlantic summit.

But a fondness for counting their chickens and a moving trust in the miraculous effects of a non-existent photograph are the only things for which one may reproach the government and the party that supports the cancellation of this trip. A trip that, although considered a good fit in the tradition of the transatlantic agenda, was, in any case, never actually confirmed.

The fiasco has nothing to do with either Spain or its prime minister, no matter how grating that may be for Schadenfreude-seeking provincialism. On the other hand, it has everything to do with the very recent shift registered in the presidential program and made official in the State of the Union address. Pressed by losses in the polls leading up to the elections, Obama has made recovery within the economy and the job market his primary concerns. This has pushed the foreign policy that characterized his first year in office (in which he made more international visits than any of his predecessors) into the background.

His presence at important meetings has been made more selective, concentrating on areas of particular friction in which he has more need of tangible results that will be noticed within the U.S.: the Middle East, Asia and Russia. The E.U., therefore, has suffered a severe diplomatic setback, playing the same kind of subordinate role to which it was relegated at the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

The new management (Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council and Catherine Ashton, high representative for foreign affairs) must put their feet on the accelerator. The Union must show that, to deal with problems of global tension, it would be useful for the U.S. to meet with its more stable allies more often, and that more can be achieved working as a collective (and not only in a bilateral format, as Merkel, Brown or Sarkozy would have it). Either that, or it will be difficult for the E.U. to halt its slide into irrelevance.