US President Donald Trump criticized German Chancellor Friedrich Merz over the war in Iran on Tuesday, a day after Merz said the Iranians were humiliating the United States in talks to end it.
“The Chancellor of Germany, Friedrich Merz, thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post, mischaracterizing Merz’s position. Merz has said Iran must not have a nuclear weapon.
Merz said on Monday that Iran’s leadership was humiliating the United States and getting US officials to travel to Pakistan and then leave without results, in an unusually pointed rebuke over the conflict.
“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 during a talk to students in the town of Marsberg.
“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,” he added at the venue in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
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Merz also said he did not see what exit strategy the US was pursuing in the Iran war — comments that underlined deep divisions between Washington and its European NATO allies, which had already been festering over Ukraine and other issues.
“The Americans obviously have no strategy. And the problem with such conflicts is always that you not only have to get in, you also have to get out again,” Merz said.
He reiterated that Germans and Europeans were not consulted before the US and Israel started attacking Iran on February 28, and that he had conveyed his skepticism directly to Trump afterwards.
“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,” Merz said, comparing it to previous US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “So this whole thing is, as I said, at the very least ill-considered.”
The German chancellor said it was evident the Strait of Hormuz had been at least partially mined. “We have offered, also as Europeans, to send German minesweepers to clear the strait, which has obviously been mined in part,” he said.
He added that the conflict was costing Germany “a lot of money, a lot of taxpayers’ money and a lot of economic strength.”
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