IN the days after he infuriated US President Donald Trump by criticising America’s war in Iran, Friedrich Merz, the chancellor of Germany, professed affection for the United States. When the Pentagon abruptly said it would pull 5,000 troops from Germany, Merz and his aides projected calm.
What Merz did not do was apologise.
In refusing to back down, Merz was adopting what has by now become a widespread tactic among European leaders who have provoked Trump’s wrath during the war.
European leaders are struggling to influence the course of the conflict and to manage its economic and security consequences. They are venting those frustrations, with little remorse.
If that move seems familiar to Trump, it should be. It is one of his favourites.
The president has built and sustained a political brand, in part, on a don’t-back-down approach. The list of comments and actions he has been asked to apologise for, but has not, is lengthy and ever-growing.
It includes calling Senator John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, “not a war hero”; a wide range of comments disparaging people from other countries, including Haiti and Somalia; and, most recently and still ongoing, a feud with Pope Leo XIV.
The pope has repeatedly criticised the war the US and Israel are waging against Iran, without apology.
Trump has sought to equate that criticism with a desire for Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon – a charge he also levelled at Merz after his remarks this month that the US had “no strategy” in Iran.
The Vatican has long opposed nuclear weapons, Leo noted recently. “If someone wants to criticise me for proclaiming the Gospel, let him do so truthfully,” the pope told reporters.
Leaders across Europe similarly brushed off Trump when he reacted angrily to their criticisms of the war, their refusal to allow the US full use of European military bases to launch attacks on Iran, and their unwillingness to meet his demands to send military force to open shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz.
Keir Starmer, the domestically embattled British prime minister, told an interviewer last month that he was “fed up” with pressure from Trump over the war.
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, was once seen as a key European ally of the president but increasingly finds Trump to be a weight on her political fortunes at home.
She called his criticism of Pope Leo “unacceptable.”
After a meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week, which appeared intended to smooth relations between the countries, Meloni did not back off the comment. She said she and Rubio had shared a “frank dialogue, between allies who defend their own national interests but who both know how precious Western unity is.”
Merz used similar language after his comments to a group of German high school students this month, in which he said Iranian negotiators had “humiliated” the US. The comments appeared to spur the surprise Pentagon announcement that it would relocate 5,000 of the about 35,000 US troops in Germany.
Pressed by an interviewer, Caren Miosga, on the German public television network ARD, soon after the troop withdrawal announcement, Merz acknowledged a rift with Trump over the comments but did not apologise for them.
“We have a different view of this war, that is no secret,” Merz said, when asked if he would make the same comments again about Trump and the war. “I am not alone in that.”
Domestically, Merz has faced almost no pressure to back off his criticism of Trump. The war remains unpopular in Germany and across Europe.
It has pushed up gas prices. Its rising economic toll appears to have helped Germany’s three opposition parties in parliament gain in the polls –the far-left Die Linke, the center-left Greens and the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
Still, some analysts say the chancellor could have chosen his words more carefully.
“You cannot humiliate this president or be seen to be doing that,” said Cathryn Clüver Ashbrook, a political analyst in Berlin, who wrote a German book about Trump, The American Wake-Up Call.
Merz, she noted, criticised Trump with a German-language expression that is akin to saying that the Iranians played the president for a fool.
“There is no other way that the White House would have read that,” she said.
In his television interview, Merz did not answer directly when asked if he would still phrase his criticism in the same way. He also suggested he could mend fences with the president.
“I am not giving up work on the trans-Atlantic relationship,” Merz said, “and I am not giving up cooperation with Donald Trump, either.” — ©2026 The New York Times Company
