Is America Being Humiliated in Iran?

Germany’s chancellor said out loud what European capitals have been whispering, and the transatlantic rift just got wider.

Friedrich Merz is not a man given to undiplomatic outbursts. The German chancellor came up through the CDU’s Atlanticist wing, spent a decade in the private sector cultivating American contacts, and built his political comeback on the promise that Berlin would be a steadier partner to Washington than the Scholz government ever was. So when Merz told reporters this week that the United States is being “humiliated” by Iran in stalled negotiations to end the war, it was not the kind of jab one expects from Berlin’s most pro-American chancellor in a generation.

It was something closer to a confession. The kind of thing an ally says when private channels have failed and the only remaining option is to embarrass the senior partner into paying attention. Merz added, for emphasis, that he could not see “what strategic exit the Americans are now choosing,” and that Tehran’s negotiators are proceeding “very skilfully, or indeed very skilfully not negotiating.” Translation: the Iranians have figured out that they can run out the clock, and the White House hasn’t.

Why Merz, and why now

To understand the significance of this, you have to understand what Merz spent the spring trying not to say. The war is hammering the German economy. Energy markets remain jittery, the Strait of Hormuz risk premium is back in shipping insurance, and the export-led Mittelstand is staring down a second consecutive recessionary year. Berlin’s own assessment is that Washington launched an ill-prepared campaign and now has no plan to end it, while Europe absorbs the collateral damage.

That is the economic story. The political story is worse. Inside the administration, according to reporting that European intelligence services have apparently found credible, Vice President JD Vance has grown skeptical of Pentagon claims about how degraded Iran’s program actually is. If the vice president of the United States doesn’t believe his own generals’ battle-damage assessments, why should Merz pretend to? The chancellor has clearly decided that public candor costs him less than continued complicity in a fiction.

There is also a domestic political calculation here, and it cuts against the grain. The AfD has spent two years denouncing German entanglement in American wars. By getting out in front of the criticism, in measured CDU language, Merz denies the far right a monopoly on skepticism. He sounds like a grown-up worried about his economy, not a populist cheering for Tehran. It is a smart move, and it is also a sign of how thoroughly the political logic in Europe has shifted.

The unhappy marriage

The Iran rupture is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening on top of an alliance that was already, in the FT’s careful phrase, an “unhappy marriage.” The American military commitment to Europe has been fraying for a decade, accelerated by Trump’s first term, briefly papered over by Biden, and now openly contested. Force posture reviews are quietly cutting troop numbers in Germany and Poland. The administration’s messaging on Article 5 has been, depending on the day, ambiguous or actively unhelpful.

European leaders have responded with the rhetoric of “strategic autonomy” for years, and very little of substance. What is different now is that the substance is starting to arrive: a German defense budget that finally clears the 3 percent threshold, a Franco-British nuclear consultation framework, EU-level defense procurement that explicitly excludes American primes from certain tenders. None of this adds up to a European army. All of it adds up to a continent that has stopped assuming the cavalry is coming.

Merz’s Iran comments fit this pattern precisely. He is not calling for a break with Washington. He is publicly noting that the senior partner is failing, in the calm tone of a man who has already started building alternatives. That is more dangerous to the alliance, in the long run, than any amount of shouting from Paris.

What the King is for

Which brings us, improbably, to King Charles. Buckingham Palace’s announcement of an expanded state visit program, with Trump receiving the full carriage-and-banquet treatment later this year, has been read in the British press as either sycophancy or shrewd statecraft. The FT’s editorial board, characteristically, argues it is both: ties with the US need mending, but Britain must nurture other alliances too.

The hedging is the point. Keir Starmer’s government has spent the year quietly rebuilding regulatory alignment with Brussels on everything from veterinary standards to emissions trading, while staging the most lavish royal reception available for a president who responds to pageantry the way a cat responds to a laser pointer. London has decided it can have the trade deal and the European re-entry, provided it pays the symbolic tribute Washington requires.

This is not a strategy available to Berlin. Germany has no monarch to deploy, no separate trade relationship to dangle, no sentimental Anglo-American mythology to draw on. What Germany has is a chancellor willing to say in public what Starmer would only ever say in a SCIF. The division of labor is becoming clear: Britain flatters, Germany tells the truth, France posts about it on social media. Together they amount to a Europe that is managing decline, American decline, more openly than at any point since Suez.

What humiliation actually means

The word Merz chose matters. “Humiliation” is not a description of policy failure. It is a description of status loss, of an actor whose threats are no longer credible because the audience has stopped flinching. The Iranians, on this reading, have learned what Putin learned in Ukraine and what the Houthis learned in the Red Sea: American deterrence has become contingent, episodic, and increasingly easy to wait out. You don’t have to defeat the United States. You just have to outlast its attention span.

If that diagnosis is right, and the evidence that it is right keeps accumulating, then Merz’s outburst is not the cause of the transatlantic rift. It is the symptom. European leaders are beginning to triangulate against an American power they no longer believe will deliver, while still carrying the costs of being publicly aligned with it. That is an unstable equilibrium. It resolves, eventually, in one of two directions: a genuine European defense capability that makes the alliance a partnership of equals, or a quiet drift in which Berlin, Paris, and even London hedge so thoroughly that the alliance becomes a ceremonial relic.

The closing question

The honest answer to the question in the headline is yes, the United States is being humiliated in Iran, and the more interesting question is who else has noticed. Beijing has noticed. Moscow has noticed. The Gulf states, which spent a decade buying American security guarantees at premium prices, have very much noticed and are pricing the next round of arms deals accordingly.