EU Offside

Barack Obama, US president, will not attend a European Union-US summit to have been held in Spain in May, dealing a blow to EU efforts to be taken seriously as a coherent force in international affairs.

Philip Gordon, US assistant secretary of state for Europe, insisted that Washington was committed to good relations with both the EU and Spain.

But the announcement will be greeted with dismay in Madrid and disappointment in Brussels.

One diplomat said Mr Obama had been "fairly unimpressed" with the results of an EU-US summit staged in Prague last year, when leaders of all 27 EU member states turned up to meet the president, eager to bask in his reflected glory.

The president's decision not to travel to Madrid is sure to disappoint European policymakers who had assumed that, with the Republican George W. Bush out of the White House, they would have a more sympathetic interlocutor in the form of the Democrat Mr Obama.
Financial Times