Brussels blog

When world leaders wrap up their G-20 talks in Seoul on Friday, the European and American contingent will have less than a week to sleep in their own beds before they head off again to another round of summitting, back-to-back NATO and EU-US gatherings in Lisbon next week.

Although there is lots of substance on the agenda – Afghanistan, missile defence, global economic stagnation – the atmospherics of the events will also be closely watched, particularly since President Barack Obama skipped out on May’s EU-US summit, causing much hand-wringing in Brussels and other European capitals.

U.S. officials are acutely aware of the narrative developing on this side of the ocean since the cancelled Madrid summit: that Mr Obama, despite coming into office amidst a surge of European popularity, is now seen as neglecting his transatlantic allies and showering attention instead on leaders elsewhere in the world. This week, those U.S. officials are fanning out to combat that narrative.

When I asked William Kennard, the U.S. ambassador to the E.U., about the general “grumpiness” in European capitals, he acknowledged it existed, but insisted it was unfounded.

“When I hear this, I get grumpy,” he said, only half-jokingly, during a meeting with a group of Brussels-based reporters Wednesday.

“What is sometimes frustrating to me is people sometimes tend to test the relationship based on face time: How many times have the leaders gotten together face-to-face,” he added. “That’s not, I don’t think, an appropriate way to evaluate the depth and intensity of the relationship. It just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

In Mr Kennard’s view, the U.S. has never been more engaged with Europe. Mr Obama visited the continent six times in his first year in office – the most, U.S. officials maintain, by any president in a single year – and U.S. officials from more than a dozen agencies are constantly working with their European counterparts. Hillary Clinton, the ambassador noted, has even developed a “very warm, personal relationship” with the E.U.’s new foreign policy tsarina, Catherine Ashdon.

Mr Kennard’s boss, Philip Gordon, the top European hand at the State Department, made a similar defence during a speech in London this week, calling the accusations of American neglect “flatly wrong” and “somewhat of a surprise to us.”

Mr Gordon, who as a campaign aide to Mr Obama helped organize the now-famous 2008 appearance in Berlin by the then-Illinois senator, said Obama advisors knew at the time it would be hard to sustain such levels of enthusiasm. But Mr Gordon insisted that polling numbers show the president remains highly popular here, and that European officials here should understand the need to focus White House attention on international trouble spots.

“I think Europeans would understand that it’s appropriate for the U.S. president to be very much focused on the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Asia,” Mr. Gordon said in an address at the Chatham House think tank.

While both Mr Kennard’s and Mr Gordon’s defences included warm embraces of Europe, other U.S. officials have told me of growing annoyance in Washington of European complaints that they’re being ignored.

Before the EU-US summit was firmly scheduled for Lisbon, for example, they expressed concerns that there was simply not enough substance on the agenda to warrant a bilateral meeting between Mr. Obama and the EU’s two presidents, José Manuel Barroso and Herman Van Rompuy. Even now, the meeting is only scheduled for two hours.

It was that lack of substance that reportedly scuttled the Madrid summit, though Mr Kennard denied this. “I’m not sure I agree with your premise, that the last summit didn’t take place because there weren’t sufficient deliverables,” he said. “The last summit didn’t take place because there was a scheduling issue. We couldn’t get the president here.”

Whatever the reason, body language and room temperature will be closely monitored in Lisbon, much like they were in Washington in March, when Mr Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy almost fell over themselves to disabuse onlookers of any hard feelings between the two leaders. It will be a lot to overcome in just two hours.