The eurozone sovereign-debt crisis and efforts to contain it will top the agenda at a summit between the European Union and the United States in Washington, DC on Monday (28 November). 

Barack Obama, the US president, will meet Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council, and José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, at the White House. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, will also attend.

William Kennard, the US ambassador to the EU, has described the crisis in Europe as “a drag on our [US] recovery”, although he was careful not to blame the eurozone’s management of the crisis. “We feel that this is a crisis that Europe needs to solve on its own and has the resources to solve on its own,” he told reporters on Tuesday (22 November). “The most important thing is that there needs to be a firewall, a commitment of significant resources to deal with the problem,” Kennard said.

The failure by the US Congress on Monday (21 November) to agree on a budget deal has added to a sense of gloom on both sides of the Atlantic.

Kennard said that the Obama administration’s strategy has been “to quietly offer suggestions and solutions” to Europeans because it “really isn’t helpful for us to be advocating publicly different solutions”.

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A eurozone crisis response ought to include three core elements, he suggested: “A more significant firewall, and there are different ways how that can be done; a commitment to recapitalise the banks; and then to deal with the peripheral countries that are in a tenuous position.”

Monday’s summit will be followed by a meeting of the Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC), whose main task is to promote closer economic integration. It will convene on Tuesday, when Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, meets Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs.

Both the EU and the US see closer integration as a way to stimulate growth in their flagging economies. The TEC has turned its attention to regulatory coherence in areas such as nanotechnology, cloud computing and electric vehicles. The TEC’s strategy is to focus on a few high-profile issues rather than to deal with the details of all economic sectors, and then to turn such flagship projects into models for other areas.

Violence in Egypt

Obama, Van Rompuy and Barroso will also discuss the situation in north Africa and the Middle East. This week’s violence in Egypt – where the first elections since the fall of Hosni Mubarak are set to start on Monday – provide a dramatic backdrop to the discussion, as does a gathering sense of urgency about stopping Iran’s nuclear programme (see below).

A final headline issue is climate change ahead of the Durban conference, which begins on the same day (see right). Neither side is under any illusion that a global pact can be forged any time soon.

The urgency of the financial crisis in the eurozone gives next week’s summit a prominence that past summits have not always had. In theory, the EU and the US meet once a year for a major bilateral summit. But the 2009 summit was cancelled amid reports that Obama felt there was not enough to discuss, and last year’s meeting was tagged onto a NATO summit in Lisbon.