Recent reporting suggests that President Donald Trump is considering a wider attack on Iran. There is of course a chance of another bloody nose, akin to the drone strike on General Qassem Soleimani or the bombing of the Fordow nuclear facility. But there is also a chance for a lot more than that—there is in some corners a desire for sustained strikes or possibly even supporting or participating in a ground operation.
Yet if the United States were to opt for something like that, there is the risk of creating refugees – a risk that has been borne out for much of the recent involvement in the Middle East. Syria is just beginning to stabilize after years of domestic civil conflict. This directly led to a refugee crisis that turbocharged the insanity of European politics and has, in the longer term, all but destroyed the postwar political consensus on the continent. Syria is not the only example and is in some sense a happier one than most—that refugee crisis has at least ended. The Libyans were not so lucky; none of the militias at war with the Libyan government have been able to rule the contiguous territory in a way that would avoid continued instability. This, of course, leaves out the biggest example. The 2003 invasion of Iraq not only destroyed some of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East but also created a refugee crisis numbering in the millions that only started to wind down after the defeat of ISIS.
Iran is very different from Syria, Libya, or Iraq, the primary difference being just how much bigger it is. Iran has around 90 million people, more than the other three countries put together. Setting aside everything else, this metric alone suggests that the scale of the potential refugee crisis would be far greater than the one that crested in the 2000s or 2010s. While each of these conflicts displaced different proportions of the target nation’s population, none was cost-free in this department. While one can argue that the worst-case Syria-style scenario isn’t the most likely, it is even less probable that this kind of action would not create any refugees at all.
Beyond sheer numbers, there is another angle to a potential refugee crisis that is equally potent: capacity and desire to house, fund, feed, and effectively subsidize that population. Middle Eastern countries are unlikely to take part in American adventures in Iran and are thus likely to balk at being asked to house millions of refugees from actions they no doubt counseled against. There would be both the risk of Iranian refugees as well as the problem of refugees in Iran from past wars in the Middle East—after all, all of these people have to go somewhere. The more inhospitable and uninhabitable their countries become, the more immigration goes from one option to the only option.
Countries like Pakistan or Turkey are likely to shoulder part of the burden, but, as in past Middle East crises, Europe is all but guaranteed to get a significant portion of this group—far more than the U.S., due to simple geography. In that sense, calling for regime change is far easier for Americans; we have to directly deal with far less of the chaos we’ll enable. At the same time, Europeans tend to play the same game, given that to some degree they’re not gambling with their own money, like their friends across the Pacific.
The politics of refugees are also far weaker than they were in the early stages of the Arab Spring. The political landscape has shifted from the days of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Wir schaffen das,” and another refugee crisis does not seem like the kind of thing that will shift it back. In European elections this year, immigration is already a hot topic without an Iranian crisis. Politicians should consider what it will become in the public consciousness should they choose to create one.
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