Here’s why Iran is sovereign and Germany is not

Sovereignty, as defined in international law, is both crucial and complex. In the real shark-pool world of geopolitics, it is not hard to spot: if you have the ability to rule at home and resist attack from outside (any outside), then you are sovereign. Otherwise not. No exceptions.

That’s why Iran has sovereignty, but Germany does not. Iran has withstood two months of a devious and brutal war of aggression waged by the US and Israel, which in turn is “merely” the culmination of decades of assaults levied via economic warfare, assassination campaigns, and subversion.

However, Iran has not only successfully foiled the current Israeli-American blitzkrieg-and-regime-change scenario, but also put the attackers on the backfoot. Tehran’s achievement is already historic. It has changed and will change the course of history.

Germany, by contrast, cannot even defend its own vital infrastructure, as the Nord Stream sabotage and its aftermath have demonstrated. What is even worse, its governments have had no will to do so. On the contrary, they have been rewarding the Ukrainian attackers with untold billions to feed Kiev’s ultra-corruption. Their backers – certainly including the US and Poland, and most likely Great Britain, too – need not worry about any trouble from Berlin either.

Case closed: Iran is sovereign, Germany is not. If you are German and find this uncomfortable, complain to Berlin.

Against this backdrop, it is oddly fitting that it is Iran which is now exerting a powerful influence on German politics despite not having any deliberate designs to do so, whereas German calls on Tehran (or, for that matter, Moscow or Beijing) to do this and leave that – as articulated by Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul with an almost comical lack of self-awareness – come across as embarrassing: sad spectacles of an impotence that doesn’t even know itself.

Iran, on the other hand, has now had a palpable impact on what unfortunately remains Germany’s single most important foreign-policy relationship. Indeed, as the current, post-1990 “unification” (really, expansion, and that’s still a polite term) Germany is really the old Cold War West Germany writ large (and going to seeds, too), the relationship with the US is more than just important. Historically, it was literally foundational.

And here we are: It is due to Iran’s resistance that this relationship has entered a deep crisis. Of course, other factors have played (or should have played) a role as well: for instance, Washington’s ferocious, bipartisan economic warfare against its old key client (polite term) in Europe, including at least complicity in destroying vital energy infrastructure and supply options (Biden, Democrats) via massive incentives for German industry to relocate to the US (Biden, Democrats) to devastation by tariffs (Trump, Republicans).

But it is over Iran that things have now come to a head: German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has openly criticized Washington’s conduct of the war, and US President Donald Trump has launched one of his social media rampages, going after Merz and Germany with, as Secretary of War (Crimes) Pete Hegseth would put it, “no quarter” given.

Trump has even threatened, in effect, to withdraw the almost 40,000 US troops from Germany. It would be stupid and self-damaging for the US to do so, but then, this is the Trump administration. Full disclosure: As a German, I hope they go ahead.

Trump has also told Merz off for wanting Iran to have a nuclear weapon (false on two counts: Iran isn’t building one, and Merz is a compliant client leader who would never dare dissent from the US and Israel) and for being bad at running Germany, which must rankle, because most Germans agree. Merz has just earned himself the worst poll ratings of any German chancellor ever.

He has made things even worse – yes, Merz can do that – by releasing an exceedingly masochistically timed interview to complain that, in essence, no one likes him. True, but saying so has only triggered a national tsunami of mockery: now he is not only vastly unpopular but derided as a wimp, who loves to dish out harsh admonishments and mean austerity but can’t take the response.

A short video clip deep-faking Merz performing a satire of MC Hammer’s classic “You can’t touch this” by singing “No one likes me” is going viral. At a town hall-style meeting, the chancellor was openly laughed at. Major mainstream media are beginning to talk about a crisis deep enough to end the current government and, even worse for Merz, about rebellious murmurs inside his own CDU party.

All of this because Merz was making remarks about the Iran War. But make no mistake: Friedrich Merz, still infamous for applauding Israeli “dirty work” (“Drecksarbeit”) in Iran last summer, has not discovered a conscience. Listen attentively to his recent statements, made before a group of high school kids, and you realize, the chancellor’s real beef with America is that Washington hasn’t done its current “dirty work” quickly and, above all, successfully. No one loves a loser, not even, it turns out, Friedrich Merz, whose prior obsequiousness toward Trump had raised eyebrows even in Germany.

Yet whatever Merz’s sordid motives, take a step back and look at this picture from the point of view of history-in-the-making: Here is the German chancellor, who claims to be ready to make his country lead Europe (yes, not a great idea, but let that pass for now), whose government is presiding over the greatest German debt-and-armament splurge since World War Two (and that against a background of profound economic crisis), and he is stumbling over Iran. So much for the rise of multipolarity and the decline of Europe.

Not because that was Tehran’s aim. As a matter of fact, the Iranian leadership probably has very little time to think about Berlin – except noting for the future that, in practical terms, it is serving as a loyal accomplice in the American-Israeli war of aggression. No, the reason Iran now impacts and shakes the American-German relationship is that Tehran has been defeating the US, and so the client state Germany is registering the public “humiliation” of America (Merz’s term) by showing immediate signs of faltering compliance.

Who in this picture is reshaping things? And who is being shaped? Here’s another way to define sovereignty. And Germany still loses.