World leaders quick to press Obama

European officials said that the Obama advisers have played their cards close to the chest. “They come in, they listen, and they say, ‘Thank you very much,’ ” said one official of a European embassy in Washington. He asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

The French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said over breakfast with reporters in Washington this week that he believes “that the personality of Barack Obama can make a difference” when it comes to Iran. But Mr. Kouchner also urged Mr. Obama to exercise caution, using a speech at the Brookings Institution to warn that the carefully plotted, as yet unsuccessful trans-Atlantic effort to rein in Tehran’s nuclear ambitions could collapse if the American game changer doesn’t actually change the game.

Israel pushing too
Israel has been pushing, too. Mr. Obama received a congratulatory phone call from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert last week, and Mr. Biden called the main candidates to succeed Mr. Olmert — Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu — on Tuesday, Israeli officials said.

A senior Israeli official said that the Israeli government is in touch with Mr. Obama’s close aides, in particular with Dennis B. Ross, President Clinton’s former envoy to the Middle East. “For us, it’s Iran,” the official said, adding that Israel wants to make sure that Mr. Obama will tackle the Iran issue as soon as he takes office. “We can’t afford a vacuum.”

Russia, too, has already made a proposal, one that is close to Moscow’s heart. Last Friday, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Alexander Grushko, said that Moscow would not deploy missiles in Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave that borders Poland, if Mr. Obama scraps the Bush administration’s planned missile defense shield. Mr. Obama has said that he supports a missile shield, provided that the technology is workable and cost efficient.

As for the Taliban, it seems unlikely that Mr. Obama will be acceding to its call for American troops to be pulled out of Afghanistan; he said during the campaign that, to the contrary, he would increase the number of American combat brigades deployed there.

Still, there could be room for compromise. Along with its usual invective against the Bush administration, the Taliban called in its statement for Mr. Obama to “respect the rights of the people to independence and observe the norms of human rights.”

“In short,” the Taliban statement said, “he should set out on a policy that will have a message of peace for the war-stricken world.”

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