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Germany is ready to raise pressure to end Iran’s nuclear program, Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Wednesday.
"We are ready to further increase the pressure and to engage in talks that serve the purpose of a swift end to the Iranian nuclear programme," Merz posted on X.
German chancellor Friedrich Merz says Berlin is prepared to raise pressure on Tehran to help bring "a swift end" to its nuclear program, while keeping the door open to talks.
“We want to work together with the Gulf states on peace in the region," Merz posted on X on Wednesday. "The developments in Iran are running counter to this. The violence must stop."
"We are ready to further increase the pressure and to engage in talks that serve the purpose of a swift end to the Iranian nuclear programme,” he added.
As hopes for talks with the United States flicker and fade, Iran’s chronic factional infighting once again appears to have torpedoed a diplomatic opening—even before it properly began.
With negotiations now hanging in the balance, conflicting signals from Tehran have reinforced a familiar pattern: internal rivalries routinely overwhelm coherence at moments requiring discipline.
On Wednesday, Axios reported that the planned talks were no longer expected to go ahead, while Israel’s Channel 12 went further, citing officials as saying the process had been cancelled altogether.
Iranian and US officials have not publicly confirmed that account, but the drift has been unmistakable.
The unraveling followed days of public discord inside Iran’s political establishment.
After President Masoud Pezeshkian said he had “ordered” Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi to travel to Turkey to discuss arrangements for talks, ultraconservative MP Amir Hossein Sabeti attacked the move in a post on X.
“Mr. Araghchi, our people are waiting for a pre-emptive action against the enemy, not negotiations. And you got up and went to Turkey?!”
The remarks ignored—or deliberately blurred—the fact that decisions on negotiations with the United States rest with the Supreme Leader, not the president. They also illustrated how calls for escalation are often deployed less as strategy than as factional positioning, regardless of the risks such rhetoric may invite.
A second episode followed when ultraconservative MP Hamid Rasai targeted Vice President Jafar Ghaempanah over an X post responding to Pezeshkian’s message about Araghchi’s trip.
After Ghaempanah wrote, “No war is good, and no peace necessarily means surrender,” Rasai questioned his loyalty and invoked his U.S.-based son, escalating the attack with religious language.
Such exchanges are not aberrations. Factional conflict has been embedded in the Islamic Republic since its inception.
Early struggles between Islamic liberals and religious fundamentalists gave way to rivalries among clerical factions, later morphing into competition between reformists and conservatives, and, since the mid-2000s, a sharper divide between hardliners and moderates.
For years, the Supreme Leader functioned as a broker among these camps, preserving a degree of political coherence. As power has become more centralized and alignments more rigid, that balancing role has weakened.
Vested interests across the system have repeatedly shown a willingness to obstruct—and at times actively sabotage—diplomatic processes rather than allow rivals to claim credit for engagement with Washington.
As many commentators, including former President Hassan Rouhani, have long observed, the fiercest resistance to talks has often come not from principled opposition to diplomacy itself, but from fear of who might benefit politically if diplomacy succeeds.
The result is a recurring pattern in which negotiations collapse not only under external pressure, but under the weight of Iran’s own internal rivalries.
Israel’s N12 News reports citing two senior US officials that nuclear talks between Iran and the United States scheduled for Friday have been canceled after Tehran backed away from previously reached understandings.
"The Iranians tried to move the talks from Turkey to Oman and to exclude other countries from them. We said no. We tried to reach a compromise, but the Iranians refused. There is a good chance that the talks will not take place at all this week," the report quoted one senior US officials as saying.
“We are not naive about the Iranians. If there is a real conversation — we will hold it, but we will not waste our time,” the report quoted another senior US official as saying.
Internet connectivity in Iran remains restricted four weeks after disruptions began, despite traffic returning to pre-shutdown levels in recent days, network monitoring firm Cloudflare Radar said on Wednesday.
Cloudflare Radar said general internet access in Iran continues to be filtered and limited through allowlists, indicating that broader connectivity has not been fully restored.
