That the next EU-US summit takes place in Lisbon - on 20 November after the NATO summit - is fitting as it will be the first post-Lisbon Treaty transatlantic leaders’ summit. Because of the treaty, EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy will for the first time act as the Union’s interlocutor with US President Barack Obama, alongside Commission President José Manuel Barroso. Previously, it was the rotating EU Presidency that assumed this role - most recently Sweden, which attended the November 2009 summit at the White House.

The subsequent EU Presidency incumbents, Spain, tried to have one more bite of the cherry by planning an EU-US summit in Spain for spring 2010. But the prestige of their Presidency received a major dent when the White House announced that Obama would not attend a summit in Spain. One White House source stressed to Europoliticsat the time that while Obama remained committed to the transatlantic summits, they thought in the post-Lisbon setup these summits were no longer organised by the revolving EU Presidency. The incident ultimately seems to have accelerated the diminishment of role of the revolving Presidency. Apart from Barroso, Van Rompuy and Obama, EU High Representative Catherine Ashton is likely to meet US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The precise duration of the summit, and its choreography with the NATO summit, is not yet clear, nor is the agenda. According to the EU’s Ambassador in Washington, João Vale de Almeida, “there will likely be a foreign policy component” that covers hot button issues like Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Middle East peace process. Almeida told Europoliticsthat the summit should also include “a few relevant issues for both sides”.

There is an extremely wide range of possibilities for other agenda items. For example, the summit will come just a couple of weeks before a crucial United Nations conference of parties meeting on climate change in Cancun, Mexico. The US Senate’s failure to enact climate legislation has been one of the biggest drags on the UN climate talks. Yet it is doubtful whether a new push from EU and US leaders - Obama’s has long been advocating such legislation - would actually increase the chances of the bill’s passage as the resistance from lawmakers is stiff.

On the trade front, the leaders can of course make an effort to revive the moribund Doha trade liberalisation talks at the World Trade Organisation. Again, the value of one more leaders’ declaration urging a deal on Doha, which has been in cold storage since summer 2008, is doubtful. On the justice and home affairs (JHA) front, the EU could lobby Obama to get the final four EU member states still not on the US Visa Waiver Programme - Bulgaria, Cyprus, Poland, Romania - added to it. Another topical dossier in the JHA domain is the upcoming talks for an overarching EU-US agreement on data protection and data transfers between law enforcement agencies.

Last but not least, the elimination of regulatory barriers to EU-US trade is a possible agenda item. A Transatlantic Economic Council (TEC), the body set up at the April 2007 EU-US summit tasked with achieving this is expected to be held in the weeks prior to the summit. EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht will be co-chairing his first TEC, along with Mike Froman from White House-based National Security Council. The TEC has been struggling to define its core mission and reap concrete results so it could be a chance to inject some momentum.