Discord between US and EU?

All is not as good as it was predicted when Barack Obama won the nomination for president of the United States. After eight years of what was perceived in Europe as the disastrous administration of President Bush, Europeans were ready to embrace Obama as a welcome change. To a point they still are, but the failure of the global economy has put a different twist in the relations between the US and the EU. This past weekend, the Americans arrived in England to the G20 meeting of finance ministers and central bankers ready with their own demands (see the article on ‘keyboardpolitics’ from March 10, 2009, “Two different directions at the G20 meeting”) but the Europeans had their own ideas.
The second area of discord is about Guantanamo. Following a campaign promise, Obama once president wants to close Guantanamo, which is viewed favorably in Europe. The problem is what the administration plans to do with the detainees after Guantanamo is closed. For those detainees which can’t be sent to their countries of origin for fear they will be killed or tortured, the US is trying to find solutions. One of them was to ask European countries to admit some of them in their soil. Some countries responded favorably but now they have began raising questions about the security risks and requirements if they accept prisoners. While this European latest reluctance has been criticized in the US it is hard to understand why when at the time the question of sending detainees to U.S. soil was put to the Senate, the vote against was 94 to 3. No American state wants to have Guantanamo detainees . Why should the Europeans have them? Specially when they believe it is a problem that the Americans created?
So the economy and Guantanamo are, so far, two problems to resolve before relations across the Atlantic improve.