THE SYMBOLISM was powerful, if unintended. A year to the day after President Barack Obama won the US presidential election, he delegated vice-president Joe Biden to have lunch with José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt, the acting president of the council, and officials attending the EU-US summit at the White House.
The slight reinforced the perception that Europe has slipped down the list of American priorities.
Mr Obama’s anniversary, the lacklustre EU-US summit, at which climate change was the main topic, and a report published this week by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), an independent research group, have prompted a new round of soul-searching over the relationship.
The report, entitled Towards a post-American Europe: a power audit of EU-US relations, says the Obama administration is frustrated and impatient with what it views as a divided and ineffectual European Union, mired in the culture of meetings and incapable of acting as a strong political partner.
Nor is it certain that the institutional changes achieved by the Lisbon Treaty will correct these problems.
“The emergence of the EU’s new external identity has complicated as much as it has simplified the transatlantic relationship,” says the report. With presidents of the European Council and Commission and a “foreign minister” to deal with, “it will remain unclear how far any of these three people is really in a position to speak for Europe”.
The brutally frank, 71-page assessment of European shortcomings was written by Nick Witney, a former British diplomat and former chief executive of the European Defence Agency who now works for the ECFR, and Jeremy Shapiro, a research director at the influential Brookings Institution in Washington.
They interviewed officials in the US and all 27 EU member countries. Having enthusiastically welcomed the election of Mr Obama, “Europe is wasting its ‘Obama moment’,” they conclude.
The report goes a long way towards explaining why Mr Obama skipped yesterday’s luncheon. Administration sources told Mr Witney and Mr Shapiro that the US president’s first EU-US summit, in Prague last April, left him 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,” they write. Washington views the summits as “an exercise in pantomime”. US secretary of defence Robert Gates allegedly demanded puzzles to see him through the 2009 Nato summit.
Economically, Europe is America’s equal, Mr Witney and Mr Shapiro write. They are “the most interdependent regions in world history” with ties that generate €2.59 trillion in sales each year. Politically, however the US National Intelligence Committee predicted in a 2008 report, Europe will remain a “hobbled giant, distracted by internal bickering and competing national agendas” for the foreseeable future.
“Seen from Washington,” the report says, “there is something almost infantile about how European governments behave towards them – a combination of attention-seeking and responsibility-shirking.” The ECFR exhorts Europeans “to decide what they want when it comes to Afghanistan, Russia and the Middle East peace process and approach Obama with clear objectives.”
More than 500 Europeans have died in Afghanistan and Europe contributes 37 per cent of foreign forces there (compared to 54 per cent for the US), yet the EU “follows the American lead”. The ECFR’s recommendation that Europe define its own strategy for the war is perhaps unrealistic, when even the Obama administration is struggling to elaborate a coherent Afghan strategy.
The ECFR notes European divisions and self-doubts over Mr Obama’s desire to “reset” relations with Moscow. Mr Obama’s cancellation of the missile defence shield in eastern Europe frightened new EU members. “It is time for European member states to address the problem directly among themselves, rather than simply waiting to be told by the US whether or not a higher Nato profile is needed in central and eastern Europe, and whether or not they are excessively dependent on Russian gas,” the report says.
The EU pays more than €1 billion annually “to finance the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate” but waits passively for the US to seek a solution. Europe needs to break the linkage, created by Israel, between the Iranian nuclear programme and Israel’s intransigence regarding its own continued colonisation of the West Bank.