political life as negotiations to form a new government collapse. the breakdown in talks raising the prospect of new elections just two months after the last election seemed to guarantee merkel a fourth term. let s go live to berlin and bring in cnn s atika shubert. bring us up to speed on what s happening there. reporter: well, at the moment, what s happening is that the president, walter steinmeier, it s his job to kind of find a way out of this political dilemma, and he s saying, look, everybody, get your act together, get back to the negotiating table. he s going to meet with the different coalition or potential coalition partners who walked out. the fdp, the free democrats and the greens. and he s going to hope that somehow they can cobble together some sort of agreement to move forward. however, it s not at all clear that any of the parties want to continue this way. in fact, chancellor merkel herself has said, you know, she doesn t want to see a minority government, and if t
like i mean you have the pro-business party on the one side the inventor of the screens on the other side you have two conservative parties involved this is a make show which is on like you but on the other side i mean you have experienced this in the silence so far a few years ago and we just mike it has existed already. and it exists in this because on the business and the level so it is a rather unlikely coalition but they also do want to be successful i mean the longer they they talk with each other and they are committed to the success ok so there is a thin bit of light out there and do models to go on if these talks don t work what happens that briefly well i mean yeah we will most likely face new election which will be a horrible scenario for the studio mainly the christian democrats especially for my self future will be bright open then and it s totally unclear whether she will
game. you ve been through it. i ve been through it. we count delegates. right now i can count fairly easily count races for romney. take california and new york. new york is proportional but california is not. and that s a big bloc of delegates just in that one state alone. jon: to hear you counting races for romney, this is something wrong with this picture, bob beckel. doesn t matter which one it is. we re looking forward to see the three of them on the trail. does my heart good to hear bob say good things. jon: we ll be watching the whole race. bob beckel, chip saltzman. thank you both. you re very welcome. jenna: we heard about sanctions tighten against iran and obama administration wants to give sank shuns more time to work and all options are really on the table here. if talks don t work, how is the u.s. military really preparing for possible conflict with iran should it actually come to that? national security correspondent jennifer griffin is live at the pentagon with mor