Barack Obama has snubbed the EU amid confusion in Washington over which "president" of Europe he would be expected to meet at a trans-Atlantic summit this spring.
The White House has said that Barack Obama will not be attending the EU-US talks planned to take place in Madrid in May Photo: REUTERS
US officials have expressed frustration because the Lisbon Treaty, which was supposed to give the EU a single global voice, has created a number of European presidents competing for Washington's attention.
Even the venue for the summit, Madrid or Brussels, has been "up in the air" after a tussle between Spain, which holds the EU's rotating presidency and Herman Van Rompuy, the new created President of Europe.
Under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, Mr Van Rompuy, President of the European Council which represents EU heads of government, should host the summit in Brussels as Europe's lead negotiator in global bilateral talks.
But Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister, insisted that he should host the summit because the EU was in "transition" after the Lisbon Treaty entered into force in December.
A US official told the Wall Street Journal that President Obama had not yet received an a formal invitation to the EU-US summit, a twice yearly meeting that has taken place since 1991.
"We don't even know if they're going to have one. We've told them, 'Figure it out and let us know'," said the official.
Other American diplomats have blamed confusion over which of the three EU "presidents" is in charge of the summit - Mr Van Rompuy, Mr Zapatero or José Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president.
"Who attends from the US and at what point will depend on who's calling the meeting," said a US state department official.
"There's a competition in Europe because you now have the standing EU architecture."
Many national and EU diplomats are dismayed at the institutional infighting that has followed the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty.
"The Spanish are behaving badly. They've made a mess of the summit but Van Rompuy and the post-Lisbon EU institutions will carry the can in the long term. The squabbling has damaged the EU in the eyes of the most powerful nation in the world," said a senior source.
A European Commission spokesman hinted that the meeting would have to be downgraded or cancelled if Mr Obama did not show up.
"Normally a summit is a summit because it is attended by heads of state and government," said the spokesman.
A Spanish foreign ministry spokesman said: "The EU-US summit is scheduled to take place in May in Madrid, as was foreseen and we are still preparing it."
US officials have indicated that Mr Obama might reschedule talks with the EU in the wings of a Nato summit in Portugal this autumn.
