The White House announced Monday that the US president will not be travelling to the normally annual bilateral summit in Madrid on May 24-25.

"It is very unlikely that this summit will take place. There is little room for manoeuvre," a Spanish government source responded, "these summits take place at the level of heads of state or government."

The Washington announcement is at the very least a disappointment for Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero who had made the summit a priority of his country's six months at the helm of the EU's rotating presidency.

US presidential aides pointed out that Obama traveled to Europe no fewer than six times last year, most recently to the Copenhagen climate summit.

"The president is committed to a strong US-EU partnership, and with Europe in general," National Security Council spokesman Mike Hammer said in Washington Monday as Obama's decision to stay away was announced.

Nonetheless being crossed off Obama's diplomatic dance card is a concern for European leaders already sensing a marginalisation from their transatlantic partner as Washington sets its gaze more firmly across the Pacific in general and China in particular.

"The Obama government has set out to form a closer political and economic relationship with China, raising fears in Europe that such a G-2' could further reduce Europe's influence in the world," the Centre for European Reform (CER) said in a recent study.

Obama is also having to concentrate his time and energies more at home as the United States deals with the aftermath of the global economic crisis and he deals with falling popularity figures

Europe is getting used to Obama's reticence to get involved with it at major events.

Last November he failed to attend the commemorations of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The same month Obama spent just an hour and a half at an EU-US summit in Washington.

Then in December the European Union emerged traumatised from a global conference on climate change in Copenhagen where the US leader preferred to negotiated directly with China and India on a minimal accord to tackle global warming.

"His world isn't Europe, it never was," according to Jose Ignacio Torreblanca, analyst at the European Council for Foreign Relations.

Hugo Brady, researcher at the London-based think-tank CER 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'."

The analysts agree that all this would be background noise if Europe was deemed more useful geo-politically to Washington.

For China and the United States to an extent "it's all about weapons" Brady said.

Washington has been disappointed by the small numbers of extra troops which the Europeans have sent to Afghanistan and the reluctance of some EU nations to accept ex-inmates of the Guantanamo jail.

Eastern European nations, formerly part of the Soviet fiefdom, were disappointed when Washington scrapped plans to deploy elements of a new US missile shield in their region, feeling the US was prioritising relations with Moscow at their expense.

"When even your friends don't take you seriously, this is bad," as Brady put it.

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