The World

The State Department is making the best of President Obama’s decision to skip a planned US-EU summit in Madrid later this spring. It’s not to be understood as a snub, you understand – the president hugely values and respects the Europeans. And the Spanish. He adores Madrid and he thinks the EU is completely fab and really, really important. He’s just a bit busy. Maybe another time.

There is no doubt that the Spanish government, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU (You thought it had been abolished? Fooled you!), will treat this as a bitter blow. The Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Zapatero was royally snubbed by George W. Bush and so it was really important to him to underline that he has a great relationship with the sainted Obama. One European foreign minister who I encountered in Davos told me that the Americans were about to pull out of the US-EU summit and added, with a smirk that suggested a worrying lack of EU solidarity – “When the Spanish hear, it will be like a nuclear bomb has gone off in Madrid.”

The Spanish are not the only Europeans feeling snubbed by Obama. The president of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, was enraged when – on a recent trip to Washington – Obama failed to schedule a lunch with him, and the Commission president was fobbed off with Joe Biden. Back in Brussels, Barroso was heard to rage – “Bush never treated us like this.” When the Europeans are getting nostalgic for George W. Bush, you know that their noses are seriously out of joint.

So what is it with Obama and the EU? Is he perhaps nurturing a grudge against politicians from the Iberian peninsula? Is it something to do with coming from Hawaii? Does he hate the smell of garlic? None of the above. It’s simply that the European Union is not very high up his list of priorities. The Europeans should take this as a perverse sort of compliment. Obama’s top foreign policy priorities include places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, China, Russia. The European Union, by contrast, is a nice quiet place that seems to be getting along fine. Why fly all the way to Madrid, just to eat some tapas and exchange some polite chit-chat. It’s a nice thing to do, if you have the time – but Obama has enough on his plate to be getting on with.

Still, while the Spanish are reeling from the cancelled summit blow, I did discover a small piece of good news for them at Davos. Apparently, the G20 have decided that Spain – which had to gatecrash the first three summits – is now going to be formally added to the group. Bad news for the Dutch, however – they are the other gatecrashers, and it looks like they are going to be asked politely to leave. Meanwhile the EU is going to be told that it cannot expect to be represented by both the president of the commission and the president of the council. Another groteseque slight, which will doubtless have Mr Barroso spluttering into his morning coffee.