Peter Feaver (really) of Foreign Policy has a post up at the magazine’s Shadow Government blog, in which he notes the troubling way in which the Iranian government views President Obama. They see him as different than the rest of the western community, which strongly opposes the Islamic Republica’s nuclear program.

The Washington Post is spinning this comment from Ali Akbar Velayati, one of Iran’s former foreign ministers and an ally of the regime leader Ayatollah Khamenei, as a positive and hopeful sign: “America accepts a nuclear Iran, but Britain and France cannot stand a nuclear Iran.” It is true that this statement is, by Iranian standards, a compliment to President Obama, but I am not sure it is a very auspicious omen about the fruitfulness of any coming negotiations with Iran…

But it is dispiriting to see the Iranians praise Obama as someone who “gets it” — who gets that Iran really needs to be a nuclear power. I don’t think it is necessarily a fair assessment of Obama’s position, but it could be a fairly revealing indication of Iran’s position. And that depresses an already pessimistic assessment about the possibility of achieving a meaningful settlement with Iran that leaves Iran short of nuclear-weapons capability.

To be clear, Feaver doesn’t oppose Obama’s plan to negotiate with Iran before even considering taking military action. He feels that diplomatic options need to be fully exhausted, and I fully agree. You don’t go charging into another war if there’s even a slight possibility that the issue can be resolved peacefully.

However, the Obama Administration seeks no preconditions and has shown itself willing to punish our strongest allies in order to negotiate with a government that insists that its nuclear program is a closed issue. Negotiating with a nation pursuing an illegal weapons program is one thing; doing so through the punishment of allies and giving the regime a propaganda victory by crawling to them without even the slightest — even rhetorical — concession is quite another.

The Iranians seem to view Obama as so willing to avoid conflict that he’ll accept a nuclear Iran; that’s dangerous and ominous for future negotiations. You don’t go into negotiations with your enemy knowing that the worst that will happen if an agreement isn’t reached is that you’ll accept the outcome but with a statement of condemnation. They won’t take you seriously and will feel absolutely no pressure to buckle.