So runs the title of a piece posted today on The New Republic‘s website, authored by Marty Peretz, that answers the question in the affirmative. Peretz poses three questions about Israel and says that Obama answers them “at a level of sophistication that ought to be a relief, if not a rebuke, to those who fret about his lack of foreign policy ‘experience.’”

First, Obama says that Israeli concessions should only be made on “the confidence that the Palestinians can enforce an agreement.” (Obama’s words.) Second, Obama believes in strengthening, and only dealing with, the Palestinian moderates. And third, Obama understands the need for Palestinian cultural reform–or as he puts it, “now is the time for them to step out of the ideological blind alley that they’ve been in for so long.”

All well and good. But isn’t there something missing here? Something that portends to be far more dangerous than Palestinian recalcitrance? There is, and it is the Iranian nuclear project. And it is on this issue that friends of Israel are most concerned.

In his Foreign Affairs piece, Obama says, as he does frequently, that

Our diplomacy should aim to raise the cost for Iran of continuing its nuclear program by applying tougher sanctions and increasing pressure from its key trading partners. The world must work to stop Iran’s uranium-enrichment program and prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Isn’t this exactly what the Bush administration has been doing for many years, to very little effect? Didn’t the Bush administration delegate Iran diplomacy to the EU-3 (France, Germany, and the UK) between 2002 and 2006? And is it not true that this coalition, working through Obama-approved international bureaucracies such as the IAEA, demonstrated nothing more than its own utter inability to stop, or even impede, the Iranian program?

Iran’s easy defeat of the EU-3 and IAEA culminated, in August 2006, in the referral of the matter to the UN Security Council, which itself has been unable to produce anything other than a series of enervated and ineffective sanctions resolutions. But Barack Obama responds to all of this by repeatedly bragging that he has never given “George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran.” Well, George Bush hasn’t actually been all that involved in Iran–the nations and bureaucracies in which Obama promises to more heavily invest have, and what exactly does anyone but Iran have to show for it?

The real problem with Obama has little to do with Israel–it is the problem that, at every step of the way, his stated foreign policy strategy is to do something that has worked out very well for him domestically: to talk, to use his charisma and elan to win people’s enthusiasm and loyalty. And so Obama’s foreign policy rhetoric is always consumed by promises of “rallying” and “forging” and “pressuring” and building “partnerships and coalitions.” What is missing from all of this is some indication from Obama–or really from any of the liberal internationalists who see their worldview articulated by him–of how he proposes to create red lines that the international community would realistically be able to enforce. This has always been the fatal flaw of the internationalists, and there actually would be some audacity to Obama’s views if he offered something new in this regard.

I wonder how, exactly, Barack Obama proposes to convince China and Russia to support the kind of robust sanctions on Iran that today those two countries reject? Does he really believe that the absence of George W. Bush, combined with the transformative power of his rhetoric, is going to make the difference?

It’s not so much that “friends of Israel” shouldn’t trust Obama. I think that anyone who cares about the seriousness of American foreign policy shouldn’t trust Obama–at least not yet.