German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in a rare moment torched US foreign policy and the Trump administration's Iran war gambit. There's been plenty of criticism out of Europe since Operation Epic Fury kicked off on February 28, but Merz's Monday words are especially direct and scathing.
He proclaimed that Iran's leadership was embarrassing the US, claiming it was prompting US officials to travel to Pakistan and then return without achieving any outcome. "The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skillful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result," he said.
The top German official made the remarks before students in the town of Marsberg. His sharpest attack came in the following: "An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards. And so I hope that this ends as quickly as possible."
Merz then claimed, "If I had known that it would continue like this for five or six weeks and get progressively worse, I would have told him even more emphatically." And yet the criticisms from EU leaders in the opening days were somewhat muted, meager, and weak.
The German leader further questioned whether the US had a clear exit strategy:
"The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy in the negotiations either," Merz said during a school visit in Marsberg, a town in his home region of Sauerland.
"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."
Indeed a tiny handful of Republicans in Congress have made a similar argument, most especially Rep. Thomas Massie, in dissenting from the Iran war, especially given there's been no formal Congressional approval or war authorization.
Merz also commented on the potential blowback to Europe: "It is at the moment a pretty tangled situation," he said. "And it is costing us a great deal of money. This conflict, this war against Iran, has a direct impact on our economic output."
The fresh critique is certainly going to add fuel to the fire of Trump's ratcheting anti-EU and anti-NATO rhetoric, given their absence in helping the US get the Strait of Hormuz back open and the return to normal functioning of global energy transit once again.
But Trump's own words have been confusing for allies to say the least - on the one hand lambasting them for not joining a US-led coalition, but then sometimes in the same breath declaring that Washington does not 'need their help'. Naturally this enables uncertain fence-sitting allies to shrug and say simply, this is "not our war" - as the lead European powers are doing.
Some American conservative pundits have been increasingly breaking with Trump over the Iran war, a trend that is likely to grow the longer the war and Hormuz crisis persists:
The White House is said to be mulling 'punishment' for allies who haven't stepped up - for example removing US troops from European territory, at a moment EU leaders have warned of the 'Russia threat' related to the ongoing Ukraine war. There's even a NATO 'naughty' list supposedly circling within the US administration.