US being ‘humiliated’ by Iran, says German Chancellor Friedrich Merz

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Friedrich Merz said the US was “being humiliated” by Iran, as the German chancellor warned he saw “no exit strategy” to end the Middle Eastern conflict any time soon.

The comments from a staunch Atlanticist leader underscore growing irritation in Europe as the US-Israel war on the regime in Tehran hurts growth, disrupts global oil and gas supplies and strains transatlantic relations.

Speaking during a school visit in western Germany on Monday, Merz said Washington “quite obviously went into this war without any strategy” and had “no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either”.

The Iranians were “obviously negotiating very skilfully — or simply very skilfully not negotiating”, he added. “A whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

After initially justifying the US-Israeli attacks on Iran — and saying it was “not the time to lecture” Washington — Merz has grown more critical of the conflict in recent weeks, as its economic fallout has spilled over into a full-blown domestic crisis.

The conservative chancellor was elected last year on a promise to revive Europe’s largest economy, but his economy ministry was forced last week to halve its growth forecast to 0.5 per cent for this year because of the Iran war.

After weeks of internal bickering, his coalition government agreed this month a €1.6bn package of short-term measures to alleviate the pain of rising fuel prices on households.

Despite a massive public spending programme to upgrade the country’s infrastructure and armed forces, the German economy is now projected to enter a fourth consecutive year of stagnation. Meanwhile, polls suggest the far-right Alternative for Germany is benefiting from the war, rising above the CDU to 27 per cent.

Merz has also grown worried about the impact of the war on US weapons shipments to Ukraine, advisers have said.

After Trump sought to enlist Nato into securing the Strait of Hormuz, Germany pushed back, with Merz’s defence minister Boris Pistorius even saying that the Iran conflict was “not our war”. But the chancellor has since said the crisis in the Middle East should not be “a stress test” of transatlantic relations either.

On Monday, he reiterated that Berlin stood ready to deploy minesweepers to help reopen the strait as part of an international mission, but only after a ceasefire agreement.

He did not see any end to hostilities in the short term “because the Iranians are obviously stronger than expected”, he said.

The war was “costing us a lot of money. It’s costing us a lot of taxpayer money, and it’s costing us a lot of economic strength”, he lamented.

“The problem with conflicts like this is always: you don’t just have to get in, you have to get out again. We saw that very painfully in Afghanistan, for 20 years. We saw it in Iraq,” he said.