Successes, failures for Obama in Europe

By JENNIFER LOVEN

STRASBOURG, France — Stop after stop, crowds are thronging, leaders gushing, headlines blaring. Even a roomful of foreign reporters applauded after President Barack Obama’s London news conference.

They love him over here. But are they giving him anything else to take home?

It’s a mixed bag: some success, several failures and much still to be determined.

The president hit the halfway point Saturday on a European trip that, by the end, will have him charming and listening (not lecturing) his way through five countries, three international summits, one-on-one meetings with at least 17 leaders, a Buckingham Palace audience, at least seven news conferences, three speeches, two question-and-answer sessions with regular-folk foreigners and three official dinners.

The locals have chased his motorcade, strained across rope lines to shake his hand and gawked at Michelle Obama’s sleek, multihued travel wardrobe. Leaders as reserved as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and as competitive — potentially even hostile — as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have raved about his leadership style.

In turn, Obama said repeatedly that the U.S. must learn as well as lead, a welcome sentiment for a world that’s sick of what many see as American bullying. Still, he declared Saturday that the U.S. “has a continued extraordinary role in leading the world towards peace and prosperity.”

Obama even engineered a solution to a dispute over the final communiqu at the London summit on the global financial crisis, conducting shuttle diplomacy between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Chinese President Hu Jintao. He came up with a compromise between the two leaders’ opposing positions on offshore tax havens and shepherded each one’s sign-off. Deal done.

But what actual achievements does all this admiration put in the new American president’s hands to take back home?

For one, he and Medvedev launched talks to further reduce the two biggest nuclear arsenals on the planet.

The 20-nation global economic summit in London didn’t yield what Obama most wanted: big new outlays of stimulus spending by other nations.

European wariness toward rising debt is one reason. Also, many Europeans blame the recession that’s enveloping them on the U.S. — its reckless ways and global dominance.

However, Obama managed to keep out of the final communiqu some potentially problematic items, most notably a global superregulator with authority inside individual nations’ financial systems.

Here in Strasbourg, the main agenda item was Afghanistan, in Obama’s conversations with the French and German leaders and at Saturday’s NATO summit.

Time and again, Obama said Europe is in as much danger from al-Qaida extremists developing footholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan as is the United States, and so must contribute to uprooting them.

But only the U.S. and a handful of other countries are engaged in the dangerous fighting in Afghanistan’s southern and eastern provinces — and, in a rebuke to Obama’s plea, that won’t change with the summit.

Still, he declared the meeting a success, with its commitments from allies to send a total of about 5,000 troops to help train the Afghan National Police and Army and to provide short-term election security, even though many will not see combat and none will go to the heavy fighting.