Grading the president's European debut

Chuck Todd Chief White House correspondent and political director • Profile

WASHINGTON - It seems a shame to let the week go by without taking a deep breath and debriefing the first overseas trip by President Barack Obama.

Looking back — with a couple of days of rest — I have reached one big conclusion about the overall media coverage of the trip: We both over-covered and under-covered the eight-day marathon.

Specifically, the minutiae of the trip was over-covered, and the larger, over-arching set-up events were under-covered.

Let’s start with the three summits: G-20, NATO and the European Union.

All the summits were over-covered, while the one-on-one meetings the president had with world leaders didn't get nearly the attention they deserved.

Both the G-20 and NATO summits struck me as a tad unruly.

The EU meeting was a faux get-together from the get-go, hastily put together by the Czech Republic as an excuse to host Obama in Prague.

Tangible results?
But as for the other two, there’s a reason why so little came out of either summit.

Ask yourself, have you ever had a productive meeting with more than a dozen, let alone two dozen, folks around a table?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy had a point when he pre-criticized the G-20, expressing concern that any language the group could craft would be too broad (in order to win unanimous agreement) to accomplish anything tangible.

And what was binding out of the G-20?

The summit led to productive one-on-one meetings and smaller breakout groups, but trying to get the entire body to move as one proved nearly impossible.

Sure, there was general agreement, and perhaps having the G-20 collectively promise to name and shame countries acting as tax shelters was a good step toward creating a safer world banking system.

And it’s possible that the decision by the G-20 to recognize the International Monetary Fund as a more influential institution for global financial policy could shift the group from being a rescue fund for poor nations to, for lack of a better description, a global Federal Reserve.

DOMINIQUE FAGET / AFP/Getty Images President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek.

Still, outside of some philosophical agreements by the 20 nations, it’s hard to identify exactly what else was accomplished at the big meeting.

Again, a lot can be said of the big conference leading to productive one-on-one meetings but as for the big gathering, not so much.

NATO's big development
As for NATO, it seems we all got distracted by the story about whether the president was going to be able to convince the group to commit more troops to Afghanistan. As a result, the truly big story about the meeting went unreported: NATO is searching for its 21st century rationale.

Seriously, shouldn’t that be the gigantic take-away from the NATO conference?

There it was, right at the top of the NATO "communiqué" — NATO’s decision to come up with a new strategic concept. It’s truly stunning, actually, that the organization continues to accept new members without having a future-minded vision of how its security umbrella will operate.

I’m not going to pretend that I’m a national security expert, but common sense dictates that an organization shouldn’t be expanding so aggressively without a strategic vision for the 21st century.

NATO's future potential for security success is predicated on success in Afghanistan but another question remains: When does the organization become too big to be useful?

At what point does NATO and the United Nations start bumping into one other? Is it nothing more than a Cold War relic that needs to be revamped?

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