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Trump’s Clash With Merz Shows It’s Hard to Stay Friends With the President
Throughout the war in Iran, Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, did all he could to keep President Trump happy. This week, Mr. Merz appeared to lose patience.
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Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin on Monday. He told a group of German students that the Iranian government had “humiliated” America with its slow-walk approach to negotiating an end to the war.
Credit...
Annegret Hilse/Reuters
By
Jim Tankersley
Reporting from Berlin
April 29, 2026,
9:01 a.m. ET
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Fallout from President Trump’s war with Iran has made it harder for foreign leaders to stick to their time-honored playbook for currying favor with him. They are increasingly finding they must choose between appeasing the president or their own voters, and they aren’t picking Mr. Trump.
The latest example is Friedrich Merz, the chancellor of Germany, who drew Mr. Trump’s ire by saying what he really thinks, out loud, about the strategic shortcomings of the American war plan.
In nearly a year in office, Mr. Merz
has invested heavily in a friendship
with Mr. Trump. He has visited the White House repeatedly, including in the early days after the Iran war began. He flatters Mr. Trump on camera and texts him often. Mr. Merz has done nearly everything the president asked on Iran, including allowing America full use of military bases in Germany to launch attacks, and committing minesweepers to patrol the Strait of Hormuz after the war formally ends.
But the war has battered the German economy and cost Mr. Merz politically. German drivers and manufacturers have been shocked by fuel-price spikes caused by the blockage of the strait. The government has slashed its forecasts for economic growth this year. Since the war began, Mr. Merz’s party, the center-right Christian Democrats, have fallen
from first place in national polls
and now trail the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, by a few percentage points.
Those pressures seemed to overwhelm the chancellor this week. Mr. Merz, who has a penchant for going off-script in less formal speaking sessions, told a group of German students that the Iranian government had “humiliated” the entire American nation with its slow-walk approach to negotiating an end to the war.
“The Americans obviously have no strategy,” Mr. Merz said at a high school assembly in western Germany on Monday, “and the problem with such conflicts is always that you don’t just have to go in, you also have to get out again. We saw that very painfully in Afghanistan for 20 years. We saw that in Iraq. So this situation is, as I said, at least ill-considered, and I do not see at the moment what strategic exit the Americans are choosing now.”
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