Critics said it was bound to happen and it did. The European Union, already sliding off the radar screen of political importance in the world despite having three Presidencies, has been ignored by US President Barack Obama who said he won’t bother coming to an annual summit this year – partly because US officials say the EU can’t even figure out who’s hosting it.

Media reports, led by the Wall Street Journal, said Obama will come to an annual EU-US summit on 24 May, tentatively scheduled for Madrid as Spain, and Prime Minister Jose Manuel Rodriguez Zapatero, hosts the rotating EU Presidency. But new EU President Herman Van Rompuy reportedly said he wants in on the deal and American officials said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso wants to be the big shot for the event.

“We don’t even know if they’re going to have one (a summit,)an unnamed US official told the Journal. “We’ve told them, ‘Figure it out and let us know,’” while another American official tried to downplay the dismissal and said internal European politics was unrelated to Obama’s decision making and he had never planned to attend this summit and that he wants to turn his attention to domestic issues, such as the incessant unemployment still roiling the country.

“Who attends from the U.S. and at what point will depend on who’s calling the meeting,” said the State Department official, who has been briefed on the deliberations. “There’s a competition in Europe because you now have the standing EU architecture.”

The EU said it still expects Obama to show up. European Commission spokeswoman Pia Ahrenkilde Hansen said that she was ”not aware of any such situation.” She added that, “It is normally the case that the summits are summits precisely because they are attended by heads of state and government.” The EU and US have held an annual summit for the last 13 years, generally switching from one continent to the other. Obama paid a record number of visits - six - to Europe in 2009, including major events such as NATO’s 60th anniversary (April) and the Copenhagen conference on climate change (December). He hosted the EU’s presidency, then held by Sweden, in November, but he’s been getting clobbered in opinion polls in the US for his failure to get unemployment under control and his administration’s policy of continuing huge bankrolls of bonuses to Wall Street and banks while workers are going bankrupt and millions of Americans are losing their homes, so Europe is not registering as much with him right now. If he doesn’t come, it could be seen as a huge embarrassment to the EU, and to Van Rompuy and the EU’s new Foreign Minister Catherine Ashton, two unknowns who’ve been struggling to gain credibility and show they are not under the thumb of the EU’s powerful countries and leaders such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.