US talks to focus on economy and trade

Obama to hold talks with Barroso and Van Rompuy at first EU summit with US since Lisbon treaty took effect.

Barack Obama, the president of the United States, is to meet EU leaders in Lisbon on Saturday (20 November) to discuss diverging monetary and currency policies, climate change and security issues.

Obama’s two-hour meeting with Herman Van Rompuy, president of the European Council, and José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, is the first EU-US summit since the EU’s Lisbon treaty entered into force last December. It takes place at the end of a two-day summit of NATO, at which national leaders will endorse a new strategic concept for the alliance and discuss Afghanistan.

Most leaders of the EU’s member states will attend the NATO summit, but they are not scheduled to meet Obama outside that meeting.

The draft final statement of the EU-US summit was still being revised by member states’ ambassadors to the EU yesterday (17 November). It contains a commitment to resist any protectionist tendencies and to seek a swift conclusion to the stalled Doha round of global trade talks. But the summit comes barely a week after a summit of leaders of the G20 group of leading and emerging economies that exposed Europe’s differences with the US. A sustained fiscal stimulus in the US has weakened the dollar and driven up the value of the euro, damaging the prospects for European exports.

The leaders will discuss climate change ahead of a round of international negotiations in Cancún, Mexico, which begins at the level of officials on 29 November. A year ago, the EU blamed the US for the failure of negotiations at Copenhagen.

Job creation

Philip Gordon, a senior US State Department official in charge of relations with Europe, said last week (10 November) that the summit would “promote economic recovery and job creation through a focus on regulatory co-operation, innovation, and the reduction of unnecessary barriers to trade”. Dealing with the specifics will fall to the Transatlantic Economic Council, an annual meeting of ministers and senior officials that is scheduled to take place in Washington on 17 December. Persistent irritants in the EU-US trade relationship include differences on genetically modified organisms, chlorinated chickens and subsidies to the aircraft manufacturers Boeing (US) and Airbus (EU).

Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, and Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, will discuss issues including Afghanistan, Iran and the Middle East on the sidelines of the summit. Ashton is to meet Iranian envoys in December.