German Chancellor Friedrich Merz offered a grim assessment of American diplomacy’s effectiveness with Tehran, asserting that “an entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”
Merz made the comments to students while visiting Carolus-Magnus-Gymnasium, a school in Marsberg in the German leader’s home region of Sauerland.
“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 told the pupils.
President Donald Trump called off a planned meeting with Iranian leaders in Pakistan on Saturday just before special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were set to depart for Islamabad, Pakistan. It was the latest disruption to months of negotiation that had frustrated the White House and generated a global energy crisis, as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.
Trump said he called off the envoys’ travel after finding the Iranian position heading into the talks unworthy of consideration. He suggested that moving forward, negotiations should be conducted by phone to save U.S. diplomats’ time.
“By the time [Witkoff and Kushner] get there, it’s hours and hours and hours of flying,” Trump told Fox News’s The Sunday Briefing. “I said, ‘We’re not doing this anymore. We have all the cards.’ If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us.”
Merz lamented that the “tangled situation” has a “direct impact on our economic output” and is “costing us a great deal of money.” And he is less than optimistic about the diplomatic nightmare being untangled.
“At the moment, I do not see what strategic exit the Americans will choose, especially since the Iranians are clearly negotiating very skillfully — or very skillfully not negotiating,” he added.
Merz told the students that if he had “known that it would continue like this for five or six weeks and get progressively worse,” the German government would have pushed back on Trump’s military intervention against Iran “even more emphatically.”
Germany has offered to provide support to clear mines from the strait and reopen the flow of maritime trade, contingent on the conflict between the United States and Iran ceasing. But the chancellor struggled to imagine how such an end of hostilities could be reached that would satisfy the White House.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi landed in Moscow on Monday to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin following the latest stall in negotiations. Moscow, a longtime ally of the Islamic Republic, has been a key source of aid since the launch of Operation Epic Fury in late February.
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Araghachi plans to “discuss developments in the war and review the latest situation” with Putin, telling the media that he is “confident that these consultations and coordination between the two countries in this regard will be of particular importance.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly asserted that the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran are part of one, multi-front conflict in which Washington and Kyiv are co-belligerents. He has warned that Trump has failed to appreciate this characterization because of his implicit trust in Putin.