U.S. President Barack Obama was celebrated like a rock star in Europe but returned home without much concrete support for his most ambitious plans.

Obama's diplomatic tour de force of Europe included pit stops at a Group of 20 summit in London aimed at saving the world economy; a NATO summit in France and Germany intended to celebrate the alliance's 60th anniversary and round up support for the crucial NATO mission in Afghanistan; a meeting with EU leaders in the Czech Republic, where Obama called for a world without nuclear weapons; and a final stopover in Turkey, where Obama reached out to the Muslim world.

All over Europe, Obamania followed the president, with crowds cheering him and heads of state and government eager to make Obama look like their new best friend. (Think French President Nicolas Sarkozy.) However, these very same leaders ducked most of Obama's concrete demands.

France and Germany vetoed the president's vision of a giant $1 trillion global stimulus plan, giving their green light only to extra funds for the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank -- a small success, at least.

At a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France, and Kehl, Germany, European nations ducked calls to send additional combat troops into southern Afghanistan, where NATO forces are engaged in bloody fighting with the Taliban-led insurgency.

While most European governments lauded Obama's new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, they agreed to send only about 5,000 additional troops, many of them police and military trainers, and some of them returning home after the Afghan elections -- not much more than symbolic support for a mission Obama has decided to boost with tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops.

And finally, Obama's call for a nuclear-weapons-free world -- a laudable albeit unrealistic goal -- was met with awkward silence from key nuclear powers, including Russia.

"In my 10 years of doing this, never have I seen the difference between atmospherics and reality to be so great," John Hulsman, a Berlin-based trans-Atlantic expert who is president and co-founder of foreign policy consulting firm John C. Hulsman Enterprises, told United Press International in a telephone interview Wednesday. "Of course it's better to have a president who is liked, who listens to America's allies with an open mind and who does not demonize America's enemies, but we really saw in this European trip the limits of good vibrations -- because despite of all those, absolutely nothing moved on the big policies."

That doesn't mean Obama engaged in poor diplomacy; much to the contrary.

The president managed to reset the alliance with several European powers, which could at a later point in time lead to more concrete commitments in Afghanistan.

He succeeded in restarting talks with Russia toward a new arms-control treaty, the concrete look of which, granted, will still have to be hammered out. But the first meeting with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev was softer in tone and has observers hopeful for a period of improved U.S.-Russian ties.

His maneuvering to convince Turkey not to veto the appointment of Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen as NATO's next secretary-general was outstanding.

It came, of course, with a price. Not exactly pleasing governments in Western Europe, a few days later in Ankara, Obama lobbied for Turkey to be accepted into the European Union.

"America wants to secure Turkey into the Western family of nations as a working example of modern Islam," Hulsman said.

That's of course contradicting the interests of many leaders in the European Union who are not exactly pleased by the prospects of more than 80 million people taken into a body that for the past years has suffered from enlargement fatigue.