Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) – Just one day after Barack Obama was elected president, America’s staunchest ally in the Middle East has publicly expressed concerns about his future foreign policy regarding Iran.
 
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Thursday that there should not be any direct talks between the U.S. and Iran to try to convince Tehran to restrain its nuclear program. Obama’s willingness to open such talks could be perceived in the Middle East as “weakness,” she said.
 
“We live in a neighborhood in which sometimes dialogue -- in a situation where you have brought sanctions, and you then shift to dialogue -- is liable to be interpreted as weakness,” Livni said in an interview on Israel’s state-run radio when asked about a U.S. policy shift toward Iran in the Obama administration.
 
The U.S.-led West believes that Iran is using its civilian nuclear program as a clandestine means to cover its pursuit of atomic weapons. Iran denies the charges and has defied United Nations Security Council resolutions aimed at halting its enrichment of uranium, which can be used to make a bomb.
 
Livni, who heads the Kadima party and is in the running to become Israel’s next prime minister, congratulated Obama on his victory on Wednesday but her comments were the first indication that there could be friction between the two allies over Obama’s policies in an area that Israel considers crucial to its survival.
 
Livni said that she did not support any U.S.-Iranian dialogue. She also said there was only a “slightly different attitude” between Obama and the Bush administration relating to “extremism” in the region.
 
“There are those that think [America] has to be aggressive, and there are those that think that there has to be dialogue. Obama falls into the second group,” she said.
 
Livni said that there would not be “dramatic” difference between the outgoing and incoming administrations and noted that there are people in the Bush administration who support dialogue with Iran.
 
“Obama’s bottom line on the Iranian issue is very clear. America won’t accept a nuclear Iran. Israel is working for sanctions against Iran, and not transmitting a message of weakness,” she said.
 
Israeli concerns
 
One Israeli official told CNSNews.com there is concern in Israel over the possibility that the U.S. would open some kind of dialogue with Iran, given the Bush administration’s recent talk about opening a U.S. interests section in Tehran.
 
Israel, which is under the most immediate threat from a nuclear Iran, tried for years to push Iran’s nuclear pursuit onto the international agenda as a threat to the world. The U.S. has been leading the effort to impose sanctions on Iran.
 
There is concern that the U.S. will ease the political and economic pressure on Tehran and maybe let Iran “get away with some things,” said the official who spoke on background only.
 
He described those “things” as the possibility that Iran would be allowed to enrich uranium to a certain level, make plutonium (also used in nuclear weapons), continue its support for terror groups, or do things that are prohibited under international treaties in exchange for calming tensions.
 
“This is what is worrying people who worry,” said the official.
 
‘Change’
 
Obama, who ran for president under a slogan of “change,” has said that he believes in “aggressive diplomacy” by opening direct negotiations with Tehran but has also said he would not take a military option off the table to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
 
Iran and much of the Middle East has been quick to seize on Obama’s call for “change,” demanding a change in American Middle East policy.
 
Ali Akbar Javanfekr, an adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, urged Obama on Wednesday to “replace Bush’s war-mongering approach with a pacifist way, and base U.S. foreign policy on friendship, justice and human cooperation.”
 
Javanfekr was quoted on state-run Al-Alam satellite news as saying that Obama’s “slogan was change” and they too believed that “change is an inevitable requirement.”
 
Push for nuclear weapons
 
Prof. Barry Rubin from the GLORIA center in Herzliya said that regardless of whether Obama holds direct or indirect negotiations with Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the incoming administration couldn’t be expected to “take a tougher line on sanctions and pressures” against Iran than the current one.
 
“This is going to have a predictable effect -- that the Iranians are going to push ahead on nuclear weapons as fast as they have with much less concern over consequences,” Rubin told journalists in Jerusalem on Wednesday.
 
According to Rubin, if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, there is a slim chance that it will use them on Israel or give them to terror groups – but it’s enough of chance that Israel must take it seriously.
 
But there is a “100 percent” chance that if Iran goes nuclear, moderate Arab states will rush to appease Iran because they know that Obama would not defend them, Rubin said. He believes Europe would be much more inclined than the U.S. to appease Iran; and he predicted that hundreds of thousands of people throughout the Middle East and Europe will join radical Islamist groups, which they will see as the wave of the future.
 
There are two opposing blocs in the Middle East, said Rubin. One is led by Iran and includes Syria, the Palestinian terror group Hamas, the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah and radical Islamic forces that hate Iran but are on the “revolutionary” side. The second group includes more moderate Arab states – (Egypt and Jordan) -- Europe, Israel and U.S. interests.
 
Rubin said he believes that Obama’s world view may lead him to try to conciliate the radicals led by Iran. But doing so, he said, would alienate the rest of the Middle East.
 
As Rubin sees it, Obama has three choices in forming his government: He could create the most leftwing government in American history, which would try to reconcile with Iran and Syria; he could follow a recognizable Democratic model, but beyond that of former President Bill Clinton; or he could end up in the “default position,” involving a years-long learning curve.
 
Dr. Eran Lerman, director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee, said that while he agrees with Rubin’s “sobering” assessment of the situation in the Middle East, he is “slightly more optimistic” because he believes that Obama has more understanding of the situation.
 
Obama has distanced himself from what he called “the liberals who fail to understand that the enemies of America are real enemies,” Lerman said. He understands that the enemies are real and that action needs to be taken. “This is not an all-around softy position,” he said.