Obama summit no-show not a snub: EU's Ashton

(BRUSSELS) - The EU's top diplomat on Tuesday rejected suggestions that President Barack Obama's decision not to attend an EU-US summit was a snub, saying a new date in November was already being considered.

The White House announced Monday that the US president would not travel to the scheduled bilateral summit in Madrid on May 24-25.

There was a swift riposte from Spain, where a government source said "it is very unlikely that this summit will take place. There is little room for manoeuvre."

However EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said Obama's decision was no more than "a logistical problem". Asked if it constituted a snub, she replied: "No, not at all."

"I knew about the possibility that President Obama would not be able to make that date," she told AFP.

While unable to give details of the clash of dates, she added that the White House was "looking for another date" for the summit, which the Spanish had seen as a highlight of their six months at the helm of the EU presidency.

"He is going to be in the Iberian peninsular in November for the (Lisbon) NATO summit so there is a question whether he could do something ... at that point," she added.

According to analysts and the Spanish press, Obama was unimpressed by the two EU-US summits he attended last year in Prague and Washington, and by the multitude of EU representatives across the table from him.

Hugo Brady, researcher at the London-based Centre for European Reform, recalls Obama's first taste of an EU-US summit in Prague last April when the Czechs were holding out on ratifying the EU's reforming Lisbon Treaty.

"You can see when he is looking down the schedule of things to do this year how he would say: 'Well, I can go to Europe for another nice ding-dong over nothing, which I don't really understand, at which the Europeans seem to want me along almost as an umpire'."

Brady and others see Obama's priorities lying more in Asia and back in domestic politics where his popularity is on the wane.