Obama off to reassure European allies

WASHINGTON - Just days after an exhausting and sometimes disappointing trip to Asia, President Barack Obama is dashing to Europe to assure America's trans-Atlantic allies that he is not neglecting them.

Obama's two days of diplomacy in Lisbon will be framed by back-to-back summits: one with the North American Treaty Organization and then a joint U.S.-European Union gathering. He was scheduled to leave Washington late last night.

But it's Obama's agenda - from the future of the Afghanistan war to disputes over currency and trade - that will be in the international spotlight at a time when he's been weakened at home by his party's defeats in the midterm elections and rebuffed abroad by world leaders.

During Obama's swing through Asia last week, he failed to ink a highly coveted free-trade deal with South Korea and couldn't rally wide-ranging international support for his opposition to China's currency manipulation.

What Obama, America's self-proclaimed first "Pacific president," did do in Asia was make clear that the economically booming region is of increasing strategic importance to the United States.

It's a reality not lost in Europe.

"There is some disappointment in the sense of how much attention he's given to Europe - that maybe he's been more focused on Asia, more focused on other problem areas, and that really the interest in Europe is about how many trainers and forces you can provide for Afghanistan," said Stephen Flanagan, a former State Department official who is senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Those concerns peaked earlier this year when EU officials were forced to cancel a summit with the United States planned for Madrid in May after the White House said Obama would not attend.

Both U.S. and European officials say the administration has worked hard since then to bridge any divides with Europe, and Obama does remain personally popular there.

"We are each other's closest partners. Neither Europe nor the United States can confront the challenges of our time without the other," Obama wrote in a New York Times editorial published Thursday.

The White House has been quick to note that Obama's trip to Portugal will be his eighth trip to the continent since taking office - though many of those stops have been just long enough for the president to spend the night. Two separate visits to Copenhagen last year didn't even allow time for that.

Obama's direct engagement with the European Union while in Lisbon will be brief. Just two hours have been allocated on Saturday for the delayed U.S.-EU summit, though European nations will play a central role in the more extensive NATO meetings.