Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said the next president needs to reinstate the U.S-Israel relationship. Photo: Michael Vadon via Wikimedia Commons.

JNS.org – Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, an expected Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential race, said in an interview with Israel Hayom published Friday that the next president “needs to both symbolically and substantively reinstate the strong allied relationship between America and Israel.”

Walker, who visited Israel for the first time in May, has not yet officially announced his candidacy. He said that although he had “read and talked about” the threats facing Israel before, “to be physically in Israel, I saw and felt the very real threat.”

“I really enjoyed my time with Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu,” said Walker, who did not give media access to his Israel trip, stressing at the time that the visit was educational in nature. “It had a natural feel. There are many things we have in common.”

Iran is “the most dominant threat in the region and in the world right now,” Walker told the Israeli newspaper.

“If any action were to go forward [with a final nuclear between Iran and world powers] they would need to dismantle their illicit nuclear infrastructure, they would need to fully disclose and be fully transparent and submit to immediate inspection,” he said. “They would need to not only deal with Israel and acknowledge it as the Jewish state, but they would also have to deal with other Sunni states in the region with whom there is obvious tension. They would have to eliminate their capacity for intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

Walker also said there is a need to “fix the increasing unrest that this administration has created by pulling out too early from Iraq, creating incredible instability there.” He said he will be “making an official announcement later this summer” about his potential presidential candidacy.