Overview
- Frank Sauer, a security policy scholar at the University of the Bundeswehr Munich, delivered the critique during ZDF’s Maybrit Illner.
- He said the Trump administration is “himmelschreiend inkompetent,” a phrase meaning egregiously incompetent, which he argued explains why the U.S. has kept the EU out of peace talks.
- The line drew laughs in the studio, and Green Party politician Marina Weisband was seen smirking at the remark.
- Wolfgang Ischinger, the former Munich Security Conference chair, backed the thrust of the criticism and called excluding the EU from talks “plainly and simply stupid.”
- FOCUS online and Merkur.de recapped the exchange as commentary and offered no new evidence about U.S. decision-making on the talks.