The special military operations conducted primarily by the United States and Israel has sparked an explosive conflict with Iran that most observers, with the exception of the United States government, have called a war. It is well known that in war, security risks as well as forced displacement threaten to trigger mass refugee flows. Despite this, little attention has been paid by the global public to the refugee crisis that looms if the conflict lasts. 

In 2015, Middle Eastern conflicts, specifically in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, caused direct displacement of approximately 1 million people. The migrants, the majority of whom were considered refugees, traveled north to Turkey then by boat to Greece and Italy. 

This mass migration triggered an EU immigration law known as the Dublin regulation. Under Dublin, the EU country which first received the refugee is responsible for keeping and taking care of the refugee. The intention of the law was to ensure fairness and efficiency, specifically preventing asylum shopping. The law had worked quite well at this so far, but caused massive problems when scaled up to the largest refugee crisis in European history. For one, eastern EU 

countries like Greece simply did not have the money to ramp up its refugee reception capacities nearly enough. 

Lesbos, which had a population of 86,000, saw over 400,000 refugees between January and August. Greece in total received over 850,000 refugees but only had spots for 25,000. This, combined with similar logistical failures during processing, meant that 92% of the initial refugees were not even fingerprinted, allowing them to practically evade Dublin and move through the European Union freely. 

This caused great dissatisfaction with Northern and Western EU nations who thought they would be largely unaffected due to their geography. Perhaps the most important observation to make here is that this crisis still greatly affects political situations in these countries. The UK’s departure from the EU was largely due to migration concerns, while far-right parties in Germany, France, and other Western European countries have been greatly empowered by public dissatisfaction with demographic shifts that are largely due to the 2015 crisis. 

Also important to note is that the Dublin regulation is still the EU’s overarching policy when it comes to refugee admission. 

This brings us to today, when Iran is already the home of 2.5 million refugees displaced from elsewhere in the Middle East. The war has already caused about 330,000 to be displaced, primarily within Iran and Lebanon, and a prolonged conflict would eventually force the

displacement outside their borders. The EU has already warned that external displacement of just 10% of its 90-million population would cause a crisis that rivals or exceeds 2015. 

This is because the immediate northern destination, Turkey, already has a massive refugee burden caused by the EU’s solution to the 2015 crisis. After the EU realized it simply could not deal with the full brunt of the crisis, it struck a deal with Turkey under which Turkey holds on to more EU-bound refugees in exchange for aid and political concessions. Though it worked at the time, it now means that there is effectively no buffer between the Middle East and Europe. 

The internal political response that would inevitably follow within the EU, if such a crisis reoccurred, would be extreme. The existing upward trend of Muslim observance in western Europe has already sparked widescale reactions, including fears of the ‘replacement’ of white people, concerns about crime, as well as more general complaints about the risk of erasing European culture entirely. 

Europeans are already concerned; a recent poll found that 59% of Germans oppose US/Israeli operations in Iran, primarily due to fears of another migration crisis. 

The looming refugee crisis from the Iran war represents both an immediate humanitarian disaster and a direct threat to the political stability of the European Union. The infrastructure failures of 2015 have not been fixed, only temporarily patched with a deal that leaves Turkey as the sole barrier between millions of potential refugees and Europe. With that barrier already strained, and with the political consequences of the last crisis still playing out across Western democracies, the EU finds itself in an even more precarious position than it was nine years ago. The question is now whether international actors will be able to prevent the conflict from escalating before that displacement becomes inevitable.