Timothy Garton Ash: Obama can now define the third great project of Euro-Atlantic partnership

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist. His personal website is www.timothygartonash.com.

In the next seven days, the Obama-who-got-Osama is due to give two major foreign policy speeches. The first, to be delivered tomorrow in Washington, is about the Middle East. Following his seminal 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, this is billed as "Cairo 2". It is intended to lay out a vision and a strategy for American policy towards the whole region, and to do that before Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu arrives in Washington. It is also meant to refute the claim, attributed to one of Obama's advisers in a recent New Yorker article, that in foreign policy he has been "leading from behind". That's not how a president wants to be seen going into a re-election year.

I'm told that the second speech, to be delivered in London next Wednesday, will be about Europe and transatlantic relations. This will come in the middle of a European tour that includes a visit to his great-great-great-great-great grandfather's birthplace of Moneygall in Ireland; all the pomp and circumstance of a state visit to Britain as the guest of Her Majesty the Queen; the G8 meeting at Deauville in France; and two days in Poland, where White House genealogists must surely be able to find some great-great-great-great-great aunt in the little town of, say, Ustrzyki Dolne, to help boost his Polish-American as well as his Irish-American vote in 2012.

Obama will deliver his European keynote in the medieval Westminster Hall, a venue in which, since 1945, only three other foreign dignitaries have had the honour of addressing both Houses of Parliament: Charles de Gaulle, Nelson Mandela and Pope Benedict XVI. That makes two towering predecessors. So a great venue has been agreed but I will bet you the content of the speech has not. As I write, they're still sweating over the first one...