Last December, President Obama visited Europe twice within 18 days. His first trip was to Oslo to accept a medallion and a check. The second was to Copenhagen, where he addressed what was by then a melting conference on climate change.

This week, the U.S. State Department confirmed that President Obama has canceled his visit to Spain in May for the yearly U.S.-EU summit. This annual meeting has been held since 1991. This is the first time a U.S. president has skipped the summit in 17 years.

The color and dates of the stamps in a president’s passport say a lot about his foreign-policy objectives and priorities. What can we take from this decision to shirk the annual U.S.-EU summit? Essentially, it’s a snapshot of what is now an entrenched, deeply sobering, and prophetically significant geopolitical reality: America is abdicating global leadership to Europe!

Of course, the White House won’t admit this. It says the president is skipping the meeting because the U.S. “had never committed to, nor planned for” it. Many analysts don’t buy it. Stratfor says this explanation seems “grossly inadequate.” But it is worse than “grossly inadequate.”

Of all the geopolitical trends unfolding right now, the emergence of the European Union as a dominant political, economic and soon-to-be military power is paramount.

For the White House to not plan to attend this summit with the EU—which has been on the itinerary of the American president every year since 1994—reveals a shocking ignorance or disregard of this critical geopolitical reality!

It’s not like the EU’s dramatic rise is a state secret. When the Lisbon Treaty/constitution was enacted in December, the EU became a legitimate superstate. The treaty, as the Heritage Foundation’s Sally McNamara observed, “contains all the essential components of an EU superstate, including a single legal personality, a permanent EU presidency, an EU-wide public prosecutor, and the position of foreign minister in all but name.” Lisbon shifted power away from Europe’s capitals, and vested “critical areas of policymaking—such as defense, security, foreign affairs, criminal justice, judicial cooperation and energy”—into the hands of Brussels.

For the United States, Lisbon comes with specific and far-reaching threats. “It restricts the sovereign right of EU member states to independently determine foreign policy and poses a unique threat to the Anglo-American special relationship,” noted McNamara. “Above all, it is a treaty that underscores the EU’s ambition to become a global power and challenge American leadership on the world stage” (emphasis mine throughout). The EU just enacted a treaty forging itself as the focal point of world politics. And President Obama shows little interest in sitting down with EU leaders to gauge how this newly empowered European superstate might change the dimensions of global politics.

Out of all the U.S.-EU summits since 1991, wouldn’t the first post-Lisbon summit be the most important to attend?

In the last three weeks, three major events have illustrated the centrality of Europe, especially Germany, in global politics. On January 18, Israel’s top leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, visited Berlin to conduct the first-ever joint cabinet session on German soil between Germany and Israel. The meeting, attended by top German leaders including Chancellor Angela Merkel, was a landmark in German-Israeli relations and occurred in the vacuum of the deteriorating U.S.-Israel relationship. It was evidence that Israel is repositioning itself around what it considers the world’s new global leader.

A week later in London, high-level officials from around the world gathered to strategize about the war in Afghanistan. Although America drove the conference, the agenda revolved primarily around convincing Europe—particularly Germany—to contribute more to the U.S.-led effort.

Then this past Sunday, world bankers departed the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, rattled by demands from European leaders for stricter rules and regulation over the global economy. Meanwhile, the big news coming out of Davos is that Germany appears to have been working on the sidelines to launch an initiative to strengthen the German military industry.

In the New York Times Tuesday, Steven Erlanger noted that Mr. Obama’s cancellation of his trip to the EU-U.S. summit has aroused a “palpable sense of insult” among European leaders. Erlanger also said it has stimulated “a growing concern that Europe is being taken for granted and losing importance in American eyes compared with the rise of a newly truculent China.”

Any student of history knows to never take a German-led European superstate for granted. Yet that’s exactly what America’s shallow, inward-focused foreign policy does. In time, the drastic underestimation of European ambition and power could prove to be America’s number-one foreign-policy blunder!

Last week, President Obama’s first State of the Union address lasted 71 minutes and ranked among the top five longest State of the Union addresses in the past 45 years. Plenty of time to address national security and explain some of America’s many pressing and knotty foreign-policy issues, right? Not so. The president devoted only seven minutes—10 percent of the speech—to issues outside American borders. This is not insignificant.

Stratfor’s George Friedman commented, “Geopolitically speaking, a global hegemon preoccupied with domestic concerns is significant in and of itself. Simply put, it means its challengers can take note of the acrimonious political debates on the home front and hope to catch America distracted on a number of global issues” (January 28). One such front, explained Friedman, is Iran and its nuclear weapons program. While Mr. Obama’s two-sentence reprimand of Tehran in his State of the Union achieved nothing, “this does not mean Wednesday carried no developments on the issue of Iranian nuclear ambition; it just means that they did not occur in Washington.”

Guess where the developments in the Iranian nuclear saga did occur?

Friedman continued: “We therefore turn to Berlin, where German Chancellor Angela Merkel made her most forceful statement to date on the questions of sanctions against the Iranian regime.”

Truly, when considered against the backdrop of Europe’s—particularly Germany’s—growing global advantage, Monday’s cancellation of the U.S.-EU summit can only be taken as a tragic snapshot of America’s confused, disinterested and inward-focused leadership. Of course, we do not mean to imply that America ought to be deferring to the EU. The Trumpet considers geopolitics through the prism of prophecy. And prophetically, this cancellation is simply another sign that America, besieged by potentially fatal domestic crises and led by naive, inward-focused leaders, is blind to the emergence of this German-led European superstate!

Any leader who recognized this reality and valued America’s security, stability and position of influence in the world would attend such a summit. There he would marshal his powers of tact and diplomacy to secure and defend America’s interests. He wouldn’t be bombastic or careless or confrontational. But he also wouldn’t allow America to be bashed and buffeted. He would stand his ground on every matter of importance, and work hard and smartly to project power not impotence, strength not weakness, confidence not diffidence.

Of course, no matter which side of the political spectrum you look, it’s evident that no such leader exists in America today. Why? Why does America lack quality leadership? Why is America’s geopolitical might shriveling, while the power of other nations is growing? How is it that we’re bombarded with fatal problems, yet none of the solutions seem to be working? Why, why,why?

Because America is cursed by God!

You can read about these curses in Leviticus 26, or Deuteronomy 28, or Jeremiah 17. If you’re interested, they’re also explained in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. Request this book and read it right away. Truly, no other book on Earth explains the history of American greatness—and the reason it is now rapidly diminishing—more thoroughly or convincingly than this book.