“They are very good at negotiating”: German Chancellor Merz believes the United States is being “humiliated” by Iran

Two months into the war with Iran, and the United States still hasn’t won. While negotiations seem to have stalled between Washington and Tehran, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said this Monday, April 27, that the Americans were “humiliated” by the Iranians, reported the Reuters news agency and the British daily The Guardian.

According to these two sources, the German chancellor was speaking to students in Marseberg, in west-central Germany, when he suggested that Donald Trump’s team was being blindsided by the Tehran regime.

“The Iranians are obviously very good at negotiating, or rather, very good at not negotiating, letting the Americans go to Islamabad and then leave without results,” Friedrich Merz said.

“An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards. So I hope this will end as soon as possible,” he added.

A meeting between American and Iranian negotiators took place in the Pakistani capital at the beginning of April, but did not result in an end to the conflict. And this weekend, the United States canceled a second round of negotiations in Islamabad.

At the same time, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met his ally Vladimir Putin this Monday April 27 in Saint Petersburg. On this occasion, he blamed the failure of the talks on “excessive demands” from the United States.

An Iranian offer under discussion

“We hold all the cards,” Donald Trump said the day before, announcing that the Americans were giving up direct negotiations. “I said we’re not going to do this anymore,” he said on Fox News. “If they want to talk, they can come to us, or they can call us, we have very good secure phone lines,” he added. “We have done a very good job, it will end soon, and we will be very victorious.”

On Monday, the United States said it was examining Tehran’s latest proposals to unblock the Strait of Hormuz. A new Iranian proposal is “under review”, said White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt, after press reports that the Islamic Republic had made a new offer via Pakistani mediators.

“We are clearly not going to negotiate through the press,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when questioned on the subject. The offer “is better than what we thought they would offer us,” he assured, however.

But “we must ensure that any agreement concluded definitively prevents them from having nuclear weapons within their reach at any time,” insisted the diplomat.