Tag: iran

US “Being Humiliated” by Iran’s Leadership, German Chancellor Merz Says

A seemingly ever-widening rift between Europe and Trump’s America is emerging as the war with Iran drags on, exposing not only strategic confusion but growing skepticism among America’s closest allies.

What began as a show of force has increasingly come to resemble a costly stalemate—one that critics, of whom there is no shortage, argue lacks both clarity and direction. At the center of the latest criticism leveled at the direction of Trump is German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who has sharply questioned his administration’s handling of the conflict.

Speaking publicly to students in Germany, Merz, who leads the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), warned that the United States appears to have entered the war without a viable endgame. “The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy,” he said.

“An entire nation [the United States] is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards,” the German Chancellor said, adding that he “hopes that this ends as quickly as possible.”

Merz’s comments reflect a broader unease across Europe, where leaders are now grappling with the economic fallout of a conflict they did not initiate. Energy prices have surged, supply chains have tightened, and the costs are being passed directly to European taxpayers.

Additionally, such language signals a dramatic shift from earlier European support for the campaign. While some leaders initially aligned with Trump’s stated objectives, the prolonged conflict and lack of measurable progress have eroded that backing.

It’s worth noting that Merz was one of the liberal-globalist EU leaders that initially baked Trump’s moves in the Middle East. The disruption of the Strait of Hormuz has proven particularly damaging. As one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints, its partial closure has driven oil prices above $100 per barrel, intensifying inflation across already fragile European economies.

Merz did not mince words about the consequences. The war, he said, is “costing us a great deal of money,” underscoring the growing frustration among European leaders who feel sidelined in decisions with global repercussions.

At the same time, diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict appear increasingly chaotic. Planned negotiations between American and Iranian officials have repeatedly stalled, including a high-profile meeting in Islamabad that was abruptly abandoned.

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US and Israel Claimed to Be Fighting for Iranian Minorities — While Bombing Them

Iranians of all stripes have been affected by the U.S.-Israeli war on their country, and the civilian cost of the conflict has yet to be fully understood. The United Nations Development Programme has raised the alarm about the “development in reverse” pushing more than 32 million people back into poverty globally, and economists have warned that 10 to 12 million Iranians, representing nearly half of the country’s workforce, are now on the brink of unemployment.

But the effect of the U.S.-Israeli aggression on Iran’s religious minorities has received comparatively little attention. Beset by years of neglect and underrepresentation at home, faith groups are now coming to grips with the cruelty of war and the devastation it has inflicted on their vulnerable institutions and houses of worship.

In Tehran, U.S.-Israeli airstrikes damaged two major churches, St. Nicholas Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Mary, drawing condemnation from Tehran’s Christian communities. Although there have not been many updates on the status of the Church of Saint Mary, St. Nicholas Church, which is a major Russian cultural site in Iran, was reportedly closed on Easter due to the extent of the damages.

One day before the U.S.-Iran ceasefire went into effect on April 8, a 68-year-old synagogue in the Iranian capital was damaged in airstrikes for which the Israeli military claimed responsibility. The Israeli military said it was trying to target a military commander living nearby and regretted the destruction, which it referred to as “collateral damage.”

The attack put further strain on Iranian Jews as they navigate the challenges of a war waged by the United States and Israel under the pretenses of bringing liberation to the country. Iranian Jewish politicians and community leaders have been vocal in criticizing the attacks targeting houses of worship and civilian sites.

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Iran war throttles global fluoride supply, impacting US waterworks

Fluoride is becoming harder to source as the war in Iran places more strain on global supply chains, leading some local governments to reduce their own use of the widely used cavity-fighting agent. Two major water supply systems in Maryland, which serve the Baltimore and suburban D.C. areas, announced this month they would be temporarily reducing the concentration of fluoride, citing the conflict in the Middle East as the cause of a wider national shortage. A Pennsylvania town halted fluoridation for at least a few weeks, also citing the war.

According to chemical suppliers and trade groups, the shortage was brought on by a confluence of supply chain disruptions as well as higher transportation costs resulting from the conflict in the Middle East.

“Some of the suppliers around the nation have either taken their supply offline or severely shortened it, or it’s gone into other streams, like not to municipal streams. And there’s only a few fluoride manufacturers in the nation,” said Emily Horne, a spokesperson for Pencco, which has supplied the Baltimore-area waterworks.

Lowering the concentration from the federally recommended 0.7 mg/L to 0.4 mg/L, the city’s Department of Public Works said this decision was brought on by “broader national supply chain disruptions, driven in part by ongoing conflict in the Middle East.” The war in Iran and the associated standoff in the Strait of Hormuz have impacted U.S. fluoride levels, as Israel is one of the major global suppliers of the chemical used in water systems, fluorosilicic acid.

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Ruthless Taxation And The Hyperstate: How Germany Profits From Crisis

The Hormuz crisis offers us a profound insight into the real power structures in Germany. Nothing seems able to convince the Berlin monolith to partially shield its citizens from the consequences at gas stations through tax cuts.

It is now unavoidable that the Iran shock will translate into an inflation driver, working its way through economic value chains into consumer prices. These developments almost force a reduction of the tax burden on households and the middle class. It may sound strange to climate socialists, but wealth is created exclusively in the private sector, and certainly not in the state bureaucracy, which is currently profiting from the price surge at gas stations at the expense of citizens and enjoying a small special economic boost.

In March alone, the Finance Minister collected roughly half a billion euros more at gas stations. That makes him the winner of the crisis.

To dispel the impression of a secret profiteer, Klingbeil points to the generally precarious budget situation. In fact, his hands are essentially tied: the Merz-Klingbeil duo is driving the country’s public debt through the roof. Klingbeil is the skywalker among European debt makers. He has begun a catch-up race to place Germany in the top tier of debt states alongside neighboring France, Italy, and Spain. The German public debt ratio currently stands at 63 percent, but the debt spiral is accelerating. This figure will rise dramatically in the coming years.

Anybody should now be clear: The debt party of a state that burns its citizens’ capital in reckless fashion, whether in Ukraine or through the redistribution mechanism of the green transformation, must end. The state is an overfed glutton, extracting ever-higher tax revenues while sinking deeper into the debt spiral.

Yet the burden does not rest solely on debt. The state’s hyperactivity drains scarce resources from the private capital market, raises credit costs, and drives genuinely productive investments abroad. The damage has accumulated for years and is being made worse by the energy cost crisis.

One can only imagine the relief that the private sector needs to restart the prosperity engine and compensate for the ever-growing damage caused by the state bureaucracy. Germany’s plight urgently calls for reforms and an end to the failed eco-socialist transformation project.

In Germany, however, things are a little different. Economic rationality does not dominate. In the land of climate doomsayers and would-be world improvers, as former Economics Minister Robert Habeck once said, „all in“ — and all levers were set towards eco-socialism.

In fact: over 50 billion euros are pumped annually by the German state through the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) into the green wonder economy, which during the Hormuz crisis proved not to solve problems but rather to be their obvious cause.

The green wonder economy is leaving deep wounds in public budgets, whose deficits are spiraling out of control – in this year alone, another 180 to 190 billion euros of new debt will likely be recorded. https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/staatsverschuldung-rekord/

No one in Berlin is thinking about tax cuts anymore, regardless of how media artists around Chancellor Friedrich Merz try to pacify the public.

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The Bloody Awful Waste of War

Iran’s forensics chief said nearly 3,400 people had been killed in the country since U.S.-Israeli strikes began Feb. 28. Almost 2,500 people have been killed in Lebanon, 32 have been killed in Gulf states, and 23 have died in Israel. Thirteen U.S. service members have been killed, and two more died of noncombat causes.

I happen to believe Iranian lives are as valuable and precious as American lives. What gives the U.S. and Israeli governments the right to inflict such disproportionate casualties on Iran, on Lebanon, on Gaza? (I know: might makes right.) If you include the Palestinians, more than 100,000 people, and probably closer to 200,000, have been killed in the latest Israeli/U.S. wars, with the United States providing most of the deadly weaponry.

Speaking of weaponry, the liberal New York Times had an article last week lamenting the heavy expenditure of costly precision weaponry (like Tomahawk cruise missiles) by the U.S. since the beginning of the Iran War. Nowhere in the article was there a complaint about the death toll, nor was there much of a complaint about the cost. No – what the liberal New York Times was concerned about was how quickly the U.S. could replenish its stockpile of weaponry so it could be prepared for a future war against peer threats like China and Russia.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Since the Iran war began in late February, the United States has burned through around 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the US stockpile. The military has fired off more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly 10 times the number it currently buys each year.

The Pentagon used more than 1,200 Patriot interceptor missiles in the war, at more than $4 million a pop, and more than 1,000 Precision Strike and ATACMS ground-based missiles, leaving inventories worrisomely low, according to internal Defense Department estimates and congressional officials.

The Iran war has significantly drained much of the US military’s global supply of munitions, and forced the Pentagon to rush bombs, missiles and other hardware to the Middle East from commands in Asia and Europe. The drawdowns have left these regional commands less ready to confront potential adversaries such as Russia and China, and it has forced the United States to find ways to scale up production to address the depletions, Trump administration and congressional officials say.

Again, if you read the article, nothing is said about morality. Nothing is said about death and dying and the bloody awfulness of war. The article simply says the U.S. has used a lot of very expensive missiles that we MUST replace if we’re to be prepared to wage more wars in the near future.

There’s not even a hint here that maybe America could be at peace – even in the most distant future. Apparently, America must always remain locked and loaded for a war with China, or Russia, or some other country and combination of countries, even as all this is couched as defending the homeland.

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The Cowardice of Qualification: When Anti-War Voices Speak the Language of Empire

A respected human rights activist has spoken repeatedly against the US-Israeli aggression on Iran. She recognizes the illegality of the war and does not shy away from condemning it in clear terms. Yet, almost invariably, she feels compelled to qualify her position, reminding her audience that Iran has killed “tens of thousands of protesters” during recent anti-government demonstrations.

The number itself is highly questionable. Even widely cited figures from international reporting – such as Reuters coverage in January 2026 – place the death toll of the protests in the thousands, not tens of thousands. But the issue here is not the exact number, nor even the complex context of those protests, which began as genuine expressions of discontent but were later exploited by various external and internal actors seeking to destabilize the country.

The issue is the qualification itself.

Many who consider themselves progressive, anti-war, liberal, or even leftist seem unable to take a clear moral position on US and Israeli actions in the Global South without inserting these qualifications. The habit may appear harmless, even responsible, but in reality, it is deeply damaging. It is not a sign of nuance – it is a symptom of a deeper moral hesitation.

By qualifying their condemnation, these voices neutralize their own position. They suggest, whether intentionally or not, a form of moral equivalence: the US-Israeli war on Iran is wrong, but Iran is also guilty; the genocide in Gaza is horrific, but Palestinians are also to blame. The result is not balance – it is paralysis.

Compare this to the moral clarity of those who support war. Their position is never qualified. It is assertive, absolute, and often built on exaggeration or outright falsehoods, yet it carries conviction because it does not undermine itself.

This pattern is not new. It is deeply rooted in the history of Western political discourse. From the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which was justified as a necessary act to save lives, to the Cold War military interventions in places like Guatemala in 1954, where regime change was framed as a defense against communism, the language of morality has consistently been used to legitimize violence.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 offers one of the clearest examples. Saddam Hussein was presented as the ultimate embodiment of evil – the “new Hitler” – while the United States and its allies were cast as liberators.

Indeed, American officials spoke openly of being “greeted as liberators,” even as the country was plunged into chaos and extreme violence. A few years later, then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described the devastation created by the Israeli war on Lebanon in 2006 as “the birth pangs of a new Middle East,” reducing immense human suffering to a necessary step in a grand geopolitical transformation.

This tradition extends even further back, to the era of colonialism, when European powers justified conquest through supposedly humanitarian missions. The abolition of slavery, for example, was frequently invoked as a moral justification for colonial expansion in Africa, recasting domination as benevolence and violence as a civilizing duty. Killing, in this paradigm, happens in the name of saving; destruction is presented as progress.

Israel has long operated within this same framework. Its wars have consistently been presented as existential and necessary for the survival of democracy and civilization itself.

Long before the emergence of Hamas, Palestinian resistance was framed through shifting labels that served the same purpose. During the 1936–39 revolt, Palestinian fighters were described in British and Zionist discourse as “terrorists,” “brigands,” and “gangs.” In later decades, the label shifted – from nationalist fighters to communists to Islamists – but the underlying logic remained unchanged: the enemy is always illegitimate, and therefore any violence against them is justified.

Many of us recognize this pattern, yet instead of exposing its fallacies, some continue to operate within it, searching for a “balanced” position while still presenting themselves as anti-war or even pro-Palestinian. They acknowledge Israeli crimes but feel compelled to condemn Palestinian “terrorism.” They oppose Israeli policies yet insist on distancing themselves from Hamas and the others, as if Palestinian resistance exists outside the historical and political reality that produced it. They speak of “extremists on both sides,” as though figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir and a Palestinian fighter in Gaza can be meaningfully compared.

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Israel Awaits U.S. OK to Attack Iran; State Dept. Admits U.S. Went to War at Israel’s Request

Israel is preparing to renew its attack on Iran, and awaits only the “green light” from the United States, the country’s defense minister said.

Israel Katz said the upcoming attack will erase the Khamenei dynasty and blow Iran back to the “age of darkness and stone,” reiterating U.S. President Donald Trump’s vow in early April to bomb Iran back to the “Stone Ages.” Katz threatened the attack as Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi announced a visit to Islamabad, where peace talks between the U.S. and Iran have been going on but failing miserably.

Katz’s remarks, former U.S. counterterror chief Joe Kent said, show that Israel is attempting to force the U.S. to continue attacking Iran. Days ago, the State Department admitted what Secretary of State Marco Rubio said early on: Israel dragged the U.S. into the war. 

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Decades-Old Iranian Jet Breached US Defenses, Struck Gulf Base in Early Phase of War — Reports

Iran’s early retaliatory strikes in the US-Israeli aggression caused significantly more damage to US military infrastructure than publicly acknowledged, with over 100 targets hit across bases in multiple Gulf countries, NBC News reported.

In the opening phase, an Iranian F-5 — a Cold War-era aircraft — penetrated air defenses and struck Camp Buehring in Kuwait, despite the presence of advanced US systems.

Facilities including hangars, runways, radar installations and command sites across Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the UAE were damaged, with repair costs estimated in the billions.

When a decades-old jet can get through and land a hit, the image of untouchable “air dominance” starts to look a lot less convincing.

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Trump Rules Out Use of Nuclear Weapons in Iran War

President Donald Trump on Thursday ruled out using a nuclear weapon in the war with Iran.

He told reporters in the Oval Office that the United States has already greatly weakened the Islamic Republic with conventional weapons, declaring that “a nuclear weapon should never be allowed to be used by anybody.”

PBS NewsHour correspondent Liz Landers asked the president whether nuclear weapons might be used in the war, which the president said was a “stupid” question. 

“Why would I use a nuclear weapon when we’ve totally and in a very conventional way decimated them without it?” Trump said. “I wouldn’t use it.”

Two days ago, Trump extended a two-week ceasefire with Tehran, calling the Iranian leadership “seriously fractured.” He also cited a request from Pakistan’s prime minister as another reason for extending the ceasefire. 

In an April 17 Truth Social post, Trump said that Iran had agreed to surrender enriched uranium buried by last summer’s strikes on an underground base. 

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Trump Orders Navy to Destroy Iranian Boats Mining Strait of Hormuz, Reposted Column That Advocates More Killing

President Donald Trump warned Iran today that the U.S. Navy would destroy boats that are laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.

The threat comes after he announced an extension of the two-week ceasefire that was to end last night, as Pakistan attempted to persuade Iran to negotiate an end to the war. How well that effort can go is now open to question.

Multiple posts on X today reported that Iran’s chief negotiator, Parliament Speaker Bagher Ghalibaf, has resigned from Iran’s negotiating team, but an Iranian journalist called those reports “ridiculous.”

And Trump reposted on X a line from Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who argues that the Iranians need a deal and Trump doesn’t. Trump must therefore kill anti-peace deal officials.

Who’s the Leader?

Trump took to Truth Social this morning to unbosom himself of another threat, as is his custom.

“I have ordered the United States Navy to shoot and kill any boat, small boats though they may be (Their naval ships are ALL, 159 of them, at the bottom of the sea!), that is putting mines in the waters of the Strait of Hormuz,” Trump wrote:

There is to be no hesitation. Additionally, our mine “sweepers” are clearing the Strait right now. I am hereby ordering that activity to continue, but at a tripled up level! 

Trump followed that with another post about supposed infighting among Iranian officials over who is running the country, and a claim that the U.S. Navy has sealed the strait.

“Iran is having a very hard time figuring out who their leader is!” Trump continued:

They just don’t know! The infighting is between the “Hardliners,” who have been losing BADLY on the battlefield, and the “Moderates,” who are not very moderate at all (but gaining respect!), is CRAZY! We have total control over the Strait of Hormuz. No ship can enter or leave without the approval of the United States Navy. It is “Sealed up Tight,” until such time as Iran is able to make a DEAL!!!

A report from U.S. Central Command appears to confirm Trump’s claim.

“U.S. forces have directed 29 vessels to turn around or return to port as part of the U.S. blockade against Iran,” CENTCOM reported:

Over past 24 hours, media reports have alleged that several commercial ships evaded the blockade, citing M/V Hero II, M/V Hedy, and M/V Dorena as examples. These reports are inaccurate.

Hero II and Hedy did not sail past the blockade as part of a flotilla that “ferried” millions of barrels of oil to the market. In fact, the Iranian-flagged tankers are anchored in Chah Bahar, Iran, after being intercepted by U.S. forces earlier this week. Dorena has been under the escort of a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Indian Ocean after previously attempting to violate the blockade. 

On Tuesday, Trump claimed that the blockade had collapsed Iran’s economy, and that the nation was losing $500 million daily.

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