Buoyed by a resurgent stock market, the White House seems to have weathered the worst storms of the Washington bailout-stimulus-budget debate, just in time to refocus its attention on its pressing international agenda, economic and otherwise.  President Obama flies to Europe Tuesday for the first overseas travel of his presidency, highlighted by a G-20 meeting in London, as well as visits to Prague and Ankara.  In addition, a NATO summit in France and Germany will see the 60 year alliance prepare to accept Croatia and Albania.   Obama will meet China’s President Hu and Russian President Medvedev for the first time. Every conceivable world issue may be touched on in one or more of these venues, and probably will.

Can Obama pull off a major surprise and come back at the end of the week with substantive economic or political commitments?

The Washington Post and others are reporting that expectations for dramatic progress at the G-20 are being scaled back.  This, apparently, because most international partners of the United States have rejected U.S. calls to enact stimulus spending bills similar to those recently passed in the U.S. Congress.  But is that the fairest measure of success?  Even the Post reports that:

Nations…are set to agree on reforms to the global financial system. There is a growing consensus, officials say, for reforms laid out by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner last week that would, among other things, impose new regulations on hedge funds. Nations are also set to create codes of conduct for offshore tax havens. The push toward establishing those codes this week led nations including Switzerland to pledge changes to their banking secrecy laws to avoid being blacklisted by others in the Group of 20.

Administration officials said nations are also set to agree on coordinated oversight of the global financial sector, bringing regulators from major countries together to consult about the risk level of the world’s 25 largest banks. “This kind of coordination is a real achievement,” a European diplomatic source said. “If you think it is easy to get 20 countries to agree to such changes, you are wrong.”

Indeed.  As economic distress spreads around the world, the greatest risk may be that national governments will behave in strictly protectionist ways.  In Europe, the EU’s limited authority may be diminished if member states won’t extend appropriate assistance to neighbor states of Central and Eastern Europe.  As the LA Times reports this morning from Hungary:

The EU’s goal of cohesion is straining relations between Western and Eastern Europe, and between formerly communist nations, the more prosperous of which, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, don’t want to be lumped with laggards such as Hungary and Latvia, which this year have seen riots and protesting farmers.

Trans-border conflicts and protests have arisen in some unlikely places.  EU member Slovenia has been using its veto power over Croatia’s entry into the EU to try to wrest territorial and maritime concessions from its southern neighbor.  The boundary differences might seem trivial but for the weeks of rancor they have inspired between the leadership of two countries that are about to become NATO allies.

Countries don’t have friends, they have interests, Tallyrand said.  Just as corporations make a cold calculation of where it makes sense to have a factory, nations will carefully calculate their international commitments, especially when they are financially strapped.  Following the unveiling last week of his new policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama will have a lot to say to international leaders during this trip about what the world should do concerning Southwest Asia, but it appears unlikely that he will win any new commitments.  As the NYT’s David Sanger recently recalled, when the State Department started soliciting European views on what to do about Afghanistan, the Europeans could see what was behind these consultations they had complained were missing under the Bush administration:  requests for substantive military and economic engagement.

In short, while there is excitement in Europe about Obama’s first visit as president, it is an unhappy continent he is about to land on, austerity-minded and inclined to blame its neighbors, near and far, for the weaknesses that it sees at home.