Roger Cohen: Europe needs to get its act together if it wants stronger ties with Obama

He's told that, responding at last to Henry Kissinger's famous jibe, the European Union has appointed a president named Herman Van Rompuy from Belgium and given him a 24/7 phone line.

So, Obama decides to try out Europe's phone number. Henry will be tickled. But the president forgets about the time difference and gets an answering machine:

"Good evening, you've reached the European Union, Herman Van Rompuy speaking. We are closed for tonight. Please select from the following options. Press one for the French view, two for the German view, three for the British view, four for the Polish view, five for the Italian view, six for the Romanian view…" Obama hangs up in dismay.

This self-deprecating little story was told by Finnish foreign minister Alexander Stubb during a meeting last week on Nato's future. Nato wants to work more closely with the EU, but, of course, it would help if Europe first defined what its strategic priorities were.

The Obama presidency has been a shock to Europe. At heart, Obama is not a westerner, not an Atlanticist. He grew up partly in Indonesia and partly in Hawaii, which is about as far from the East Coast as you can get in the United States. "He's very much a member of the post-western world," Constanze Stelzenmller, of the German Marshall Fund, said. The great struggles of the Cold War, which bound Europe and the United States, did not mark Obama, whose intellect and priorities were shaped by globalisation, and whose feelings are tied more to the Pacific and to Africa. He can make a respectable speech on a Normandy beach, but he's probably the first US president for whom the Allied landing is emotionally remote.

These truths have taken a while to sink in because Europe, in its widespread contempt for George Bush, saw in Obama a saviour who would restore transatlantic ties. One by one, European leaders have been disappointed by his cool remoteness. A jilted feeling has spread.

In fact, Obama is a pure pragmatist. He wants Europe's help, particularly in Afghanistan, but he has no misty-eyed vision of Atlanticism and sees more pressing strategic priorities in China, India, the Middle East and Russia. He is transitioning the US to the post-western world, which is another way of saying he is adapting America to a world in which its relative power is eroding. It remains to be seen how Americans will respond to the sobriety of a foreign policy short on stirring exceptionalist narrative and long on realism. Europeans, meanwhile, are wondering what hit them.

The situation was well summarised by Jeremy Shapiro and Nick Witney in a report for the European Council on Foreign Relations that described the European attitude to the United States as "basically infantile and fetishistic". By this, they meant the way European states exist in a form of obsessive dependency on the US (even as they criticise it) that prevents them from forming strong EU positions.

I'd say China earns more respect from Obama for its clear, if confrontational, sense of strategic direction than Europe does for deference in the service of disarray. Europe needs to get over America to discover itself. That discovery might provide a basis for strong ties. To use Baloo's memorable image in The Jungle Book, the old transatlantic world is "gone, man, solid gone".

If the Lisbon Treaty is to mean anything, and Van Rompuy to emerge as more than an amiable figurehead, the EU needs to develop coherent strategies for China, Russia, Middle East peace, Afghanistan and energy security, to name just five areas where it seems to have no unified position. Now even France has seen EU-Nato rivalry is of comical silliness in a world where the West needs coherence just to hold its own, Europe must also work hard on harmonising its military strategy.

US defence secretary Robert Gates was scathing about Europe in a recent speech: "The demilitarisation of Europe – where large swaths of the general public and political class are averse to military force and the risks that go with it – has gone from a blessing in the 20th century to an impediment to achieving real security and lasting peace in the 21st."

I think that was over the top. The European contribution and sacrifice in Afghanistan have been immense – especially the UK's. I don't see European defence budgets increasing, even if they lag the US by a huge margin. But what's essential is that duplication and waste in Europe be cut by co-ordinating defence spending priorities. In defence, as in foreign policy, it's clarity, not voicemail hell, that America's non-Atlantic president needs.