Worried 27 seeking reassurance

Empty chair policy? Europe is hurting after Obama turned down its Madrid invitation. Photograph: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Dear Agony Uncle,

What do you do if a special relationship starts feeling stale? We are the leaders of 27 nice, sensible European powers, and we always thought we had something pretty special with the USA. We were hoping to take that to a new level with President Obama. But he seems more interested in hanging out with the Chinese and Indians in the G20.

Now he has decided not to attend the EU-US summit the Spanish are planning for May. Even George Bush never did this! Doesn’t Barack take our relationship seriously?

Worried 27, Brussels

Dear Worried 27,

It’s time to calm down. President Obama decided not to come to one summit. You’ve reacted by looking anxious and needy. Nobody finds neediness attractive. Stop it.

You’re looking clingy as well. President Obama has been to Europe six times since taking office – compared to one trip to China, and none to India. Sometimes it feels like you guys would only be happy if he talked to Europeans and no one else at all.

Remember all that silliness at the UN General Assembly in September? Gordon Brown got worked up because he couldn’t get a one-to-one meeting with Obama on the sidelines of the conference. But the annual UN bash is the only time the president has the chance to talk to leaders from many African and Asian countries – so he naturally didn’t have a lot of time for Europeans he gets to see elsewhere. Give the man a bit of breathing space.

Let’s get down to the real issue here. Is it the president who isn’t taking this relationship seriously, or is it you? You’re measuring how well things are going by how many times you meet, but great photo opportunities aren’t always the same as great foreign policy.

Take, for example, the ritual that grew up around transatlantic meetings on Afghanistan last year. The US would signal in advance that it hoped Europe would offer more troops. European diplomats would mutter that this looked very difficult. In the end, a small group of NATO members typically stumped up a few extra hundred soldiers each – enough to declare success, but hardly a satisfying return on grinding diplomatic work.

For many American officials, this is indicative of Europe’s multilateralism: heavy on the talk, light on outcomes. The nadir was the first EU-US summit in 2009, hosted by the Czechs, where every single EU leader turned up with a statement – leaving Obama dazed and confused. This year’s cancelled summit would not have been that bad. Spanish officials were paring back the agenda, but it has yet to coalesce into anything special.

The summit could have gone ahead, with lots of sugary speeches in front of the cameras. But US officials have learnt that once the platitudes are out of the way, you Europeans can be nasty about the president behind the scenes. Nicolas Sarkozy made nice with Obama at last year’s G20 and G8 summits, but was quoted as calling him inexperienced.

It is hard to imagine Herman Van Rompuy or Catherine Ashton saying anything so disobliging. But be honest with yourselves, Worried 27: can you really blame the president for skipping an event without a compelling agenda or goals? Sure, George W Bush turned up for that sort of thing – but he thought that all conferences were pointless gab-fests anyway. Barack Obama is a bit more stringent when it comes to getting results.

It’s hard, I know. After all, you spend half your time in slightly pointless meetings with each other. President Obama hasn’t always been very fair with you – he decided to upgrade the G20 and (by implication) downgrade the G8 without drawn-out consultations in Europe.

But he still needs and wants Europeans to be his friends. It’s just that you’re a very high-maintenance bunch of people to be friends with. You shouldn’t obsess about this. You’ll have lots of quality time together in future. For now, though, he’s just not that into EU.

The Agony Uncle