...The transatlantic partnership does not need more summits, fora, or dialogues. The Prague summit at which President Obama was subjected to 27 interventions from the EU's assembled heads of state and government was an eye-opener for his administration: senior figures have made plain to us their dread that the Spanish initiative could lead to something called "the Madrid Process".

What is needed instead is serious European discussion of which issues currently really matter in transatlantic terms - and on which of those issues Europeans can present a united position to the Americans...

I'm not sure I understood this passage. I would think that a serious European discussion of which issues currently really matter in transatlantic terms would involve a lot of these dreaded summits, fora, or dialogues, only without the USA.

I don't think we can get around this messy state of affairs in the intergovernmental EU.

The methaphor in the comment title is developed later, I'll quote long:

The continuing inadequacy of formal EU-US dialogue is particularly exposed by the annual EU-US summits. These meetings normally bring together the US president and relevant cabinet members with the president of the European Commission, the head of state and/or government of the country that holds the European Council's rotating presidency, the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, relevant European commissioners and their equivalents from the presidency government, and sometimes those of the next government in line. To Americans, these summits are all too typical of the European love of process over substance, and a European compulsion for everyone to crowd into the room regardless of efficiency.12 Bush was so dismayed by his first summit experience at Gothenburg in 2001 that he promptly halved the meetings' frequency to once a year; administration sources are frank that Obama's encounter with all 27 European heads of state and government at the Prague summit in April 2008 left him incredulous.

As a result of this complex, compartmentalised relationship, Americans feel as if they are trying to deal with Proteus. The shape-shifting Europeans appear now as NATO allies; now as an EU that in turn sometimes appears as 27 states trying to act as one and sometimes one trying to act for 27; and now as individual states, each of whom expects its own relationship and access...

Being the committed anti-Atlanticist, I have the rebellious thought that on the long run, EU foreign policy self-paralysis will work towards Europe's de-facto exit from the American sphere of influence, earlier than any attempt to form a joint position in Europe's present state of self-denial and divided interests (e.g. say the real existing differences between say Poland's and Germany's interests in the relationship with Russia).

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}