Thursday 30th April, 2026
US President Donald Trump has lashed out at German Chancellor Friedrich Merz for being critical of the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran. Instead of countering the German leader’s compelling arguments, Trump has alleged that Germany is not opposed to Iran’s nuclear programme. He has written in a social media post that Merz thinks it is all right for Iran to have a nuclear weapon and does not know what he is talking about. If Iran had a nuclear weapon, the whole world would be held hostage, Trump has claimed. Merz has said nothing to suggest that Germany is soft on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Instead, he has very convincingly pointed out that the US-Israeli military strategy is ill-conceived and flawed.
Trump is known for using circular reasoning and false dichotomy when he tries to defend the indefensible. His claim that Iran has to be prevented from acquiring nuclear capability is self-defeating, for US Intelligence Chief Tulsi Gabbard herself has testified before the Congress that Tehran is not building nuclear weapons. Washington has manufactured a casus belli again, the way it did in 2003 to justify the invasion of Iraq; it claimed that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of chemical weapons.
Ironically, President Trump, who has been eyeing the Nobel Peace Prize, is not at peace with the rest of the world, including the NATO member states. Having bombed Iran, destroying assets worth billions of US dollars and killing thousands of civilians, he has opted for negotiations with Tehran. International media reports and defence analysts have indicated that the US has exhausted a substantial portion of some of its missile stockpiles, and now it has to rebuild the inventories, a task that will take a considerable time; this could affect Washington’s preparedness for future conflicts, they have pointed out. Trump is believed to have made a virtue of necessity by declaring a ceasefire.
Merz’s criticism of the US-Israeli war on Iran has struck a responsive chord with all peace-loving people around the world. His assessment of the West Asian conflict is spot on. He has rightly pointed out that Washington is being humiliated by Tehran’s negotiating tactics. Iran has openly stated that it did not ask for a ceasefire.
It is obvious that Trump plunged headfirst into war, without having an exit strategy. He and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may have expected to make short work of Iran, engineer a regime change and install a puppet regime in Tehran. Iran’s resilience and strategic moves made the US-Israeli military plans go awry.
Merz has cogently argued that the problem with conflicts like the current one in West Asia is that “always you don’t just have to get in – you have to get out again, as was seen in Afghanistan for 20 years and in Iraq”. In Afghanistan, after two decades of fighting, which caused thousands of civilian deaths and cost the western taxpayers about a trillion dollars, the US and its allies replaced the Taliban with the Taliban, as it were.
In an asymmetric engagement, there is hardly anything that the weaker side, fighting for survival, does not weaponise. Iran effectively shifted the war to the economic front while attacking Israel, the US bases in the region and the critical assets of the American allies within its missile range. The closure of the Hormuz Strait, which Iran is using as a strategic lever, has disrupted global oil and fertiliser supplies passing through that chokepoint. Massive oil price hikes could not have come at a worse time for Europe, which is still struggling to deal with the fallout from the Ukraine war and the Covid-19 pandemic. The soaring oil prices have become a double whammy for the European nations as well as others. It is only natural that Europe does not want the West Asian conflict to drag on. US farmers are also complaining of staggering increases in production costs due to soaring fertiliser prices. The US naval blockade has not helped Washington solve the problem—the closure of the Hormuz Strait for international navigation. Oil prices are rising and economies are screaming the world over. Trump has had to clean up the mess he and Netanyahu created in West Asia.