"The Iranians are clearly stronger than expected and the Americans clearly have no truly convincing strategy."

"The Iranians are clearly negotiating skilfully or very skilfully not negotiating... a whole nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership."

Said Chancellor Friedrich Merz, quoted in "Is German troop withdrawal start of US uncoupling from Europe? After President Trump took offence at Friedrich Merz’s Iran war comments, Donald Tusk warned that infighting was a bigger threat to Nato than its external enemies" (London Times).

Not a typo for "Donald Trump." There really is a Donald Tusk in this story. He's the Polish prime minister, Donald Tusk. His mild-mannered contribution to the debate is: "The greatest threat to the transatlantic community is not its external enemies, but the ongoing disintegration of our alliance."

Last paragraph of the article: "What Merz has done, through speaking his mind to teenagers in a Sauerland school, is to telegraph to Trump all too clearly how his handling of the Iran war has been seen in European eyes. Even if the number of troops being withdrawn now is small, that speaks to deep dysfunction at the heart of Nato."

How does the Times know Merz is "speaking his mind"? I would guess he has more aggravating things he's thinking about and not saying. And is there something about the presence of teenagers that's supposed to inspire frankness? As we used to say in the 1960s, "tell it like it is."

Researching that 60s youth slang, I encountered this NPR article from 2015: "Tracing The Origin Of The Campaign Promise To 'Tell It Like It Is'":

"I tell it like it is." Chris Christie made this his campaign slogan. Donald Trump repeats it whenever he's challenged on something he has said. And Scott Walker, Rick Perry, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich and Rick Santorum have said the same thing. It's the conventional pledge of candor, or what passes for it in American public life.

It's actually odd that anybody's still using the phrase. By rights it should have gone the way of dated '60s slang like "right on" and "can you dig it?" Like those expressions, "tell it like it is" had its roots in black speech in the 1940s and 1950s....

The phrase caught on in the early '60s, when black activists made "tell it like it is" a byword for confronting the realities of race in America. It was picked up by the hippies and the student left, and it soon became a hallmark of youth culture. Howard Cosell promptly co-opted it as a slogan, and the frenetic disc jockey Murray Kaufman wrote a guide to the younger generation called Murray The K Tells It Like it Is, Baby.

By 1968, George Wallace supporters were calling out "tell it like it is, George" at his rallies, apparently unaware that the phrase had been introduced a few years earlier by the likes of Malcolm X and LeRoi Jones. Politicians took it up to sound tuned in and relevant. Richard Nixon used it in his speech at the 1968 Republican Convention, urging the "forgotten Americans" to "tell it like it is." Gore Vidal suggested that Nixon probably didn't know what the phrase meant but assumed it was the kind of hip slang that Jack Kennedy would have heard from his Rat Pack pals in Vegas....