Simon Tisdall: U.S. & Europe Still Need Each Other
[Simon Tisdall is an assistant editor of the Guardian and a foreign affairs columnist.]
Rebuffed in Asia and repudiated at home, Barack Obama's bent and battered bandwagon heads for Europe this week, looking for a change of political fortune, or at least a welcoming smile. But sulky, insecure Eurocrats, awaiting his arrival in Lisbon for Saturday's one-day EU-US summit, have not forgotten last May's Madrid debacle, when he failed to show up at all. Obama's "snub", they say, reflects a bigger problem: the US president does not care about Europe.
"Not so!" cry senior White House advisers. Unlike that nasty Mr Bush and his uncouth Pentagon rough-rider Donald Rumsfeld, they say, Obama loves you Europeans to bits, all of you – east, west, Latin, Anglo, old and new; we just have difficulty expressing our feelings sometimes, what with so much else going on in the world. It's not that Europe has grown irrelevant, or irritating, or ineffectual. It's simply that it's not, you know, pressing.
Addressing a pre-summit Washington forum organised by the EU Institute for Security Studies, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Europe director on Obama's national security council, said the Euro-grumblers and whingers had got it all wrong. "Re-engaging with our European allies is a top priority for the Obama administration. We have no ambivalence about the emerging role of the [post-Lisbon treaty] European Union. It is not a rival but a partner," she said.
That's not quite how it looks from Berlin, Paris and Brussels. Dark memories of bruising transatlantic rifts over Iraq, the international criminal court, Kyoto, rendition and Guantánamo have receded since Obama took office, though not entirely. But they have been replaced by a sense of disappointment, of disrespectfulness barely concealed and high expectations not met, of a not so benign neglect...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Rebuffed in Asia and repudiated at home, Barack Obama's bent and battered bandwagon heads for Europe this week, looking for a change of political fortune, or at least a welcoming smile. But sulky, insecure Eurocrats, awaiting his arrival in Lisbon for Saturday's one-day EU-US summit, have not forgotten last May's Madrid debacle, when he failed to show up at all. Obama's "snub", they say, reflects a bigger problem: the US president does not care about Europe.
"Not so!" cry senior White House advisers. Unlike that nasty Mr Bush and his uncouth Pentagon rough-rider Donald Rumsfeld, they say, Obama loves you Europeans to bits, all of you – east, west, Latin, Anglo, old and new; we just have difficulty expressing our feelings sometimes, what with so much else going on in the world. It's not that Europe has grown irrelevant, or irritating, or ineffectual. It's simply that it's not, you know, pressing.
Addressing a pre-summit Washington forum organised by the EU Institute for Security Studies, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Europe director on Obama's national security council, said the Euro-grumblers and whingers had got it all wrong. "Re-engaging with our European allies is a top priority for the Obama administration. We have no ambivalence about the emerging role of the [post-Lisbon treaty] European Union. It is not a rival but a partner," she said.
That's not quite how it looks from Berlin, Paris and Brussels. Dark memories of bruising transatlantic rifts over Iraq, the international criminal court, Kyoto, rendition and Guantánamo have receded since Obama took office, though not entirely. But they have been replaced by a sense of disappointment, of disrespectfulness barely concealed and high expectations not met, of a not so benign neglect...