Back home, some of the more rabid right-wing detractors of US president Barack Obama accused him of trashing America for the sake of currying favour among Europeans on his eight-day tour; accused him of selling out his country for the sake of the approval that they say that he craves.

Obama’s top advisers, as the Washington Times reported on April 7, portrayed his European trip as "a farmer planting his crops, saying he is pleased with the progress he made but expects the real payoffs to come down the road".

Apart from the much-publicised change of tone, away from the unilateralism and catastrophic arrogance of the Bush years – the change of tone that made conservatives all but accuse Obama of treason – and Obama’s talk of "partnership", there was an unavoidable impression of him coming to Europe representing a country that could afford arrogance even less than it ever could.

From the G20 summit in London to the "two bridges" Nato summit, the EU-US gathering in Prague and the highly sensitive mission to Turkey, there was an inescapable sense that author and commentator Fareed Zakaria was correct about the phase of history in which the US, Obama and the world find themselves.

"The financial crisis has accelerated the process. So we are entering the post-American world much faster than even I had anticipated," Zakaria said on CNN in a commentary as Obama’s eight-day trip drew to a close.

Certainly, Obama came away with less than his administration might have wanted – while he won a further injection at the G20 for the IMF, leading European countries such as Germany and France balked at further domestic spending for the sake of economic stimulus, or if you prefer, balked at building up further future debt. For all that, Obama hailed the G20 meeting as a turning point in a global response to the financial and economic crisis.

The Nato summit produced an agreement to step up deployment of military personnel in Afghanistan ahead of elections to be held there this year, and produced confirmation in the official communique that Afghanistan is the alliance’s priority one, but hardly saw any indication of a willingness for European countries to get on board in a significant way to help the US in the way that Obama wants.

The governments of individual countries with whose leaders Obama shared time to one degree or another issued their own individual statements glittering with the gloss of glamorous association.

The office of Bulgarian President Georgi Purvanov issued a statement after the two met during the Nato summit. The United States highly values Bulgaria’s role and contribution within Nato, and acknowledges and values Bulgaria’s efforts in "the search of new and permanent solutions of problems concerning energy stability and security," Purvanov’s office said.

Obama also had a conversation with Greek prime minister Costas Karamanlis. Reportedly, there had been some sensitivity about Obama choosing to visit Turkey and omitting to step on Greek soil in the same round of visits. Whatever the core of the matter, media reports suggested that Obama and Karamanlis had traversed some tricky ground in their short engagement, including the vexed issue of the dispute between Skopje and Athens over the use of the name Macedonia, Turkey’s presence in the Aegean and the Cyprus unification issue. The substance of what was said has not been made public officially, with the only confirmation of part of the conversation being that Karamanlis had made reference to the Greek decision to increase its military deployment in Afghanistan.

Relations with Turkey and the Muslim world in general were a key theme both in Prague and in Ankara and Istanbul.

Obama ruffled French feathers, among others, by repeating Washington’s view that Turkey should be accepted as a member of the European Union, a step that he said would be received by the Muslim world as a positive sign.

When he went on to Turkey, however, while repeating his support for Turkish EU accession, he called on Ankara to take a number of steps seen as conditional to progress in Turkey’s EU aspirations, down to the detail of calling for the reopening of the Orthodox Christian seminary of the island of Halki near Istanbul.

"Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond," Obama said.

Protests and public anger of various varieties dogged all the meetings and summits which Obama attended, but it would be as absurd to overestimate the significance of these as it would be to underestimate the significance.

On his way home, Obama did not fail to make a stop in Iraq, Turkey’s neighbour, an albatross for America (perhaps justifiably with a lower case "a" now that there is an attempt at move away from the disastrous policy of the past). But even as he made his brief stop, which the security situation made mandatory to be a surprise one, few could fail to remember that whatever groundwork he had laid in Europe, whatever successes could be claimed, the days he had spent on this side of the Atlantic were a trip to an increasingly post-American world; one in which it is not easy even to find friends in Europe willing to take prisoners from Guantanamo.