DESPITE PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s fervent restatement of the “fundamental bonds” and “common values” that bind the US to Europe, despite his assertion that the US “stands ready” to help Europe resolve the debt crisis, it was obvious at the end of the US-EU summit at the White House yesterday that the Obama administration will take no concrete steps to help Europe.
The two-day summit, which ended with a White House lunch, was dominated by the debt crisis. “This is of huge importance to our own economy,” Mr Obama admitted as he stood alongside president of the European Council Herman Van Rompuy and president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso.
“You know, if Europe is contracting or if Europe is having difficulties, then it’s much more difficult for us to create good jobs here at home because we send so many of our products and services to Europe,” Mr Obama said.
“And so we’ve got a stake in their success, and we will continue to work in a constructive way to try to resolve this issue in the near future.”
Mr Barroso noted that together the US and EU represent half of global GDP and one third of world trade. His statement that “decisions take time” sounded like a plea for patience on the part of the US.
In recent days there have been rumours and speculation that the IMF – rather than the European Financial Stability Facility or the European Central Bank – would step in to guarantee the debts of European governments. William Kennard, Mr Obama’s ambassador to the EU, quashed those rumours at a press conference after the summit.
“The president has been very clear over a number of months now that we want to offer advice and guidance to Europe,” Mr Kennard said. “We have recent experience with our own financial crisis . . . I want to be very clear there was no discussion about the US increasing its commitment to the IMF or making any other financial obligation to the EU. That was not a part of this discussion.”
Asked what advice Mr Obama gave to his European guests, Mr Kennard implied that US policy on the European debt crisis is not to announce one.
“Our position is that we don’t divulge publicly the details of our advice,” he said. “Lots of ideas are floating around and we find it to be not particularly useful to publicise our views.” But Mr Kennard also made it clear that Washington was losing patience with Europe’s seeming inability to surmount the crisis. “The president has made it clear repeatedly that he would like to see bolder decisions,” the ambassador said.
Speaking earlier in the day, Mr Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney also emphasised that the crisis is Europe’s responsibility: “Europe has the resources and capacity to deal with it and they need to act decisively and conclusively to resolve this problem,” he said.
The US has steadfastly refused to intervene in the disagreement between Germany and its European partners over the role of the European Central Bank as a guarantor of European sovereign debt.
Mr Obama said the summit was “not the most dramatic” because “we agree on so much”. One point of discord, raised by Mr Obama himself, was the EU’s imposition of its Emissions Trading System on US airlines travelling to Europe starting next January.
The system could see US airlines fined for using polluting fuel. “We are quite concerned” about it, Mr Kennard said. “The EU has chosen not to proceed in a multilateral fashion.”
“We are not opposed to a multilateral solution,” countered Joao Vale de Almeida, the EU ambassador to Washington. “But we have been waiting too long. If there was a good one, we would buy it.”