What began as a spat between Friedrich Merz and Donald Trump over the Iran war is rapidly turning into a historic rupture between Germany and the US. Its significance is hard to overstate. In Germany, the transatlantic falling-out adds to the domestic woes of a coalition government in crisis, overshadowing the first anniversary of Merz’s becoming chancellor tomorrow.

More importantly, it proves the futility of Merz’s attempt to be Europe’s Trump-whisperer and puts Nato’s credibility into question. But the dispute also boosts the ambition that Germany’s conservative leader set out on the night of his party’s election victory: to make Europe more independent from the US security umbrella.

This rupture started with the chancellor’s remarks last week about the stalling talks between the US and Iran. The Iranians, Merz observed to an audience of secondary schoolchildren, “are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skilful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result”.

“An entire nation,” he concluded, “is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership.”

It was an unexpected moment of truth-telling, one that may turn out to be rather costly. Merz has replaced Pope Leo as the favourite target of Trump’s late-night social-media invective. The chancellor, Trump posted, “doesn’t know what he is talking about”, is “totally ineffective”, is presiding over a “broken country” and presumably “thinks it’s OK for........

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