Think the AFD in Germany are our friends? Guess again.

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The far-right Alternative for Germany party has long styled itself the Trump administration’s closest partner in Germany, and members of the administration, especially Vice President JD Vance, have spoken supportively of the AfD. But at the first real stress test, the party abandoned President Trump. It condemned the U.S. military strikes against the Iranian regime.

“Donald Trump started as a president of peace,” Tino Chrupalla, an AfD co-chairman, said. “In the end, Donald Trump will end as a president of war.” Those are strong words from a man who declined to criticize Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for his war against Ukraine and threats against Germany. “He hasn’t done anything to me,” Mr. Chrupalla said of Mr. Putin in November.....

In an official statement, the party leadership declared it was watching the U.S. and Israeli strikes “with great concern” and added: “The renewed destabilization of the Middle East is not in the German interest and must be brought to an end.”

The AfD leadership failed to mention that the regime in Tehran has destabilized the region for decades by directing terrorist organizations in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq, supporting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad during the civil war, and contributing to a massive wave of refugees into Europe. The party’s first official statement didn’t contain a single critical word about the Islamist regime itself, which has secretly pursued a nuclear-weapons program and has carried out terrorist attacks on German soil.

Meanwhile, the center-right Christian Democratic Chancellor Friedrich Merz, frequently smeared by the AfD as anti-Trump, stood firmly behind the U.S. He made clear that he regards the Islamic Republic as a “terrorist regime” and that he shares the objectives of Germany’s allies.

Mr. Merz delivered the most remarkable foreign-policy sentence ever spoken by a postwar German leader: “Legal classifications under international law will achieve relatively little—especially when they largely remain without consequences.” The comment is a jolt of realism for German elites, who, more than 80 years after World War II, generally treat international law as sacrosanct.

For his support of the American president, the AfD accused Mr. Merz of “pathetic submission” and derided him as a “U.S. vassal.”

This episode demonstrates that the Trump administration misjudged the AfD in treating it as its principal ally in Germany and as similar to other European populist movements of the right. There are parallels between the MAGA movement and the AfD, particularly in their calls for restrictions on immigration and the disdain with which the political and media establishment treats them. But what MAGA appears to have misunderstood most about the AfD is the core of every German far-right movement: its intractable anti-Americanism.

German nationalists have never fully forgiven America for World War II. Nor for the cultural competition, from hamburgers’ supplanting bratwurst to the omnipresence of American films and music. The most radical far-right activists claim that Germany remains occupied by the U.S. and therefore isn’t a sovereign state. While German nationalists often seek alliances with European partners, American patriots are for them fundamentally incompatible allies. The very concept of the U.S.—a nation that opens itself to people from around the world—is irreconcilable with far-right German blood-and-soil ideology.

For that reason, parts of the AfD viewed with deep skepticism the alliance pursued by party co-chairman Alice Weidel and some of her followers. They understood the deeply rooted hostility toward America within much of the party’s electorate, which tends to be sympathetic to Russia and China....

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