Obama’s trip: Is Europe’s approval meaningful?

The reviews are in: “The Obamas wowed ’em in Europe,” said Gail Collins in The New York Times. Expectations were high last week for our new president’s first overseas trip, to the G-20 summit in London. Officially, he was there to help coordinate action on the world economic crisis. Unofficially, he was taking the first steps in undoing eight divisive years of George W. Bush’s arrogant, go-it-alone foreign policy. In that, Obama succeeded. Europeans were giddy when he stated that America doesn’t believe in torturing people, and they nearly swooned when he said, “We exercise our leadership best when we are listening, when we recognize the world is a complicated place, when we show some element of humility.” At one point, Obama impressed his fellow leaders by skillfully reconciling an angry disagreement between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chinese President Hu Jintao. By trip’s end, said Clarence Page in the Chicago Tribune, Obama and his wildly popular wife, Michelle, had reassured “a worried world” that the U.S. was their friend again.

Friend—or patsy? said Rich Lowry in National Review Online. Obama’s trip can be summed up by two words: “Excuse me.” He played to European vanity by “chastising Bush and his countrymen for their arrogance,” blamed the U.S. for starting the financial crisis, and “noted his country’s diminished power with evident satisfaction.” Yes, the Europeans—and Russians—loved this abject display of weakness from an American president. But what did Obama gain by it? Nothing—certainly not the world’s respect.

He sure didn’t get any European concessions, said Andrew Neil in TheDailybeast.com. The whole point of the G-20 get-together was to enact “a coordinated global fiscal stimulus.” But Obama didn’t squeeze one extra cent out of the member nations. The $1.1 trillion that the G-20 has said it would pump into the world economy “was in the pipeline long before the summit.” Obama also got nowhere on Afghanistan, said Jonathan Martin in Politico.com. While the U.S. is putting an additional 21,000 troops on the ground, our European allies agreed to send only 5,000 more—temporarily. “Obama is finding out that simply not being George W. Bush isn’t enough.”

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We’ve learned something very important about Obama, said Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post. “He can work smoothly and productively with a wide range of foreign leaders—provided that he allows them to set the agenda.” Having gotten nowhere with his own priorities—the stimulus and Afghanistan—Obama happily refocused on such European concerns as financial regulation and “fresh funding for the IMF.” This kind of deference will be exploited by bull-headed foreign leaders such as Sarkozy, Hu, and Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev. It’s also reminiscent of how Obama “allowed congressional Democrats to take control and set priorities” on the budget. Is Obama really pragmatic—or is he “too passive, even weak?”

Let’s not forget that this was Obama’s first presidential venture overseas, said Jim Hoagland, also in the Post. He sought mainly “to establish for foreign audiences how different he and Bush are,” so as to create trust and respect that will help in future negotiations. But demonstrations of warmth and openness are not policies. They are means to an end, and soon the applause will die down. “Americans and foreigners alike now expect Obama to define what he learned by all that listening, and to show how he intends to apply it.”