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Western Europe and the Iran War

"France has already surrendered in the newest war."
This was a humorous tweet I saw this morning that got me thinking.


My statement is more tragic than comic, "A Nation That Once Toppled Iran Now Cannot Criticize Islam".

When the United States and Israel struck Iran this morning, the leaders of France, Germany, and the United Kingdom issued a joint statement from the French presidential palace. They expressed concern about civilian lives. They called for a resumption of negotiations. They condemned Iranian repression of protesters. They did not participate in the operation and they made sure you knew it.

That statement, from three countries that between them shaped the modern world and once dominated it militarily, is worth examining. Not just for what it says about today, but for what it reveals about a transformation in Western Europe that has been happening for decades and that this war is about to accelerate.

The Country That Started This

In 1953, British intelligence and the CIA orchestrated a coup in Iran. The target was Mohammad Mosaddegh, Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister, who had committed the unforgivable act of nationalizing Iran's oil industry. The oil had been controlled by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, which later became BP. Mosaddegh wanted Iran's oil wealth to benefit Iran.

Britain found that intolerable. The coup removed him from power, restored the Shah, and guaranteed that Western oil interests would control Iranian petroleum for another generation. The Iranian people did not forget. When the Islamic Revolution came in 1979, the hostage taking at the American Embassy was not random. It was a message about what America and Britain had done in 1953. The revolution's founders built their entire ideology around the grievance of foreign domination, and they were not wrong that the domination had been real.

Britain in 1953 was confident enough in its civilizational purpose to topple foreign governments on behalf of its economic interests. It was, in that sense, still an empire, even if the formal empire was dissolving. It had a clear idea of what it was and what it wanted.

Britain in 2026 is a country where the most popular baby boy's name is Muhammad, for the second year in a row, according to official data from the Office for National Statistics. Muhammad alone was given to 5,721 boys in 2024, a 23 percent increase over the prior year. When you combine the three main spellings, Muhammad, Mohammed, and Mohammad, the name was given to 8,467 boys in 2024, roughly one in every 33 male births in England and Wales. Muhammad topped the charts in five of England's nine regions. It is the most popular name in London, in the North West, in Yorkshire and the Humber, in the West Midlands, and in the East Midlands.

Britain is also a country where, as of 2025, critics of the government argue it is operating a soft blasphemy law enforced not through Parliament but through the Public Order Act of 1986. In 2024, arrests for speech offenses hit a new high, topping 13,000 across England and Wales according to data from the Telegraph. People have been prosecuted for burning a copy of the Quran. A woman named Lucy Connolly was jailed for 31 months for a tweet posted in the aftermath of the Southport murders, in which three young girls were killed at a Taylor Swift dance class by a 17 year old attacker. Her tweet, which was offensive and which she later deleted and apologized for, called for mass deportation and expressed rage at asylum seekers. She was convicted of stirring up racial hatred and sentenced to more than two years in prison.
You may believe her sentence was justified. You may believe it was excessive. What is notable is that Britain spent decades protecting Pakistani grooming gangs from prosecution because police feared being called racist, and then jailed a woman for an angry tweet within weeks. The asymmetry tells you something about where institutional fear is actually located in modern Britain.

The mayor of London is Sadiq Khan, a Muslim. This is not itself a problem. A man can be a Muslim and a fine mayor. But it is one data point in a demographic transformation that is happening faster than most people publicly acknowledge.

The Grooming Gang Scandal: What Institutional Fear Costs

From at least the late 1980s through 2013, organized networks of predominantly British Pakistani men sexually exploited thousands of girls in towns and cities across northern England and the Midlands. The confirmed minimum in Rotherham alone is 1,400 victims, girls as young as 11, raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked across towns, threatened with guns, doused in petrol. In Telford, investigators estimated over 1,000 victims across four decades. The abuse has been documented in at least 30 cities. The inquiry conducted by Alexis Jay, one of the most rigorous child protection investigations in British history, found the abuse was known to local authorities and police for years before any serious action was taken.

Why did it take so long? The Jay Report found that councillors had fretted that discussing the ethnic dimension could harm community cohesion. Police feared being accused of racism. Whistleblowers were dismissed as Islamophobic. A Channel 4 documentary about the abuse was postponed in 2004 over fears it could trigger race riots. The 2025 Casey Report, commissioned to examine the national scale, found that the ethnicity of perpetrators had been deliberately shied away from and that flawed data was being used repeatedly to dismiss claims of a pattern.

The scale adjusted for population is staggering. Rotherham has a population of roughly 257,000. The United Kingdom has a population of roughly 67 million. If the rate of abuse documented in Rotherham applied nationally, the number of victims would be in the hundreds of thousands. Even conservative projections based on confirmed cases in multiple cities put the total well into the tens of thousands. If you adjust that proportionally to the United States, with a population roughly five times larger, you are talking about the equivalent of tens of thousands of American children sexually exploited in an organized, ethnically identifiable pattern, protected for years by institutions too afraid of being called racist to intervene.

That is not a fringe accusation. It is what the British government's own inquiries found. The Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, wrote in 2017: Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls. She was shunned by her own party for saying it. She was right.

The Numbers in France and Germany

France is home to approximately 6 to 7 million Muslims as of 2025, roughly 9 to 10 percent of the total population. Most trace their origins to North Africa, reflecting post colonial migration from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. France does not collect official religious census data, but demographic studies consistently place the figure in this range.

Germany is home to approximately 5.5 to 6 million Muslims, representing 6 to 7 percent of the population. The largest group is of Turkish origin, but Syrian, Afghan, and Balkan communities have grown substantially since the 2015 refugee crisis, when Germany took in well over a million asylum seekers. Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to open Germany's borders that year was one of the most consequential domestic policy decisions in post-war European history.

The United Kingdom is home to approximately 4 million Muslims, about 6 percent of the population.

These numbers look manageable in raw percentage terms. The future projections are more striking. The Pew Research Center's high migration scenario projects that by 2050, Germany will be approximately 20 percent Muslim, France 18 percent, and the UK 17 percent. These are not fringe estimates. They are from the most respected demography research organization in the world, and they are based on trends that are already in motion.

The birth rate dimension compounds this. Muslim women in Europe have a total fertility rate of approximately 2.6 children per woman, compared to 1.6 for non-Muslim European women. Europe's overall fertility rate is 1.5, below the 2.1 replacement level. Native European populations are shrinking. Muslim populations in Europe are growing. In France, Muslims already contribute approximately 30 percent of births despite being 9 to 10 percent of the population. That gap widens every year.

None of this is said to suggest that European Muslims are the enemy. The vast majority are not. Many are fully integrated, productive, patriotic citizens of their adopted countries. The question is not about individuals. It is about institutions, about social cohesion, and about what happens when a civilization loses confidence in itself faster than it can integrate the people arriving inside it.

The Fear That Already Governs European Policy

Here is the honest truth that European governments will not say plainly: policy decisions across France, Germany, and the United Kingdom are already being shaped by fear of Muslim community reaction in ways that would not apply to any other religious or ethnic community.

In Britain, the grooming gang scandal festered for decades in part because of institutional fear. In France, the government has struggled for years with how to address the problem of radicalization in suburban housing projects, the banlieues, where the state has functionally ceded authority and where Islamic extremist networks operate with considerable freedom. France has also banned the hijab in schools and public sector employment, a policy that reflects both genuine commitment to secularism and deep anxiety about public displays of Islamist identity. In Germany, more than a thousand Islamists marched in Hamburg in April 2024 demanding a caliphate and Sharia law. The demonstration was legal. The Hamburg government wrung its hands.

Conservative MP Nick Timothy, a former Downing Street advisor, gave a conference address in October 2025 warning that Britain is sliding toward a soft blasphemy law enforced by police and prosecutors using the Public Order Act. He cited cases of people prosecuted for burning the Quran or publicly criticizing Islam. He noted that Islamist organizations control whole wings of British prisons, with prison officers afraid to intervene, and that prison officers appeal to what are called emirs, usually terrorists or violent offenders, to help maintain order. The independent reviewer of UK terrorism legislation confirmed this in a formal report.

The three European leaders who issued a statement today calling for negotiations and declining to participate in the Iran strikes are operating inside that context. This is not primarily about strategic disagreement with the United States, though that is part of it. It is about domestic political calculation in countries where millions of Muslim voters and hundreds of thousands of Muslim activists create real electoral and social consequences for foreign policy decisions that are perceived as hostile to Muslim populations.
You do not have to believe this is nefarious to notice it. It is simply the math of democratic politics operating inside the demographic reality those governments created through decades of immigration policy.

What a New Refugee Wave Would Mean

Now consider what this war may produce.

When Syria descended into civil war after 2011, an enormous wave of refugees moved into Europe. Here is where those Syrians went: approximately 1,281,000 went to Germany, approximately 80,000 went to France, and approximately 50,500 went to the United Kingdom. Total across those three countries: roughly 1.41 million. Syria's pre-war population was approximately 22.7 million. That means approximately 6.2 percent of Syria's pre-war population ended up in those three countries.

Iran's population is approximately 92.4 million people. If this conflict produces a displacement similar in proportional scale to Syria, approximately 6.2 percent of Iran's population would seek refuge in those three countries. That is roughly 5.75 million people. Using the Syrian distribution pattern, Germany would receive approximately 5.2 million, France approximately 330,000, and the United Kingdom approximately 210,000.

These are not predictions. They are scale comparisons with stated assumptions. The actual numbers depend on border policy, transit routes, asylum rules, and decisions by individual governments that have not yet been made. And the comparison has an important distinction: Iranians are Persians, not Arabs. They are not the same population as Syrian refugees. Iran has a substantial educated urban middle class, significant numbers of women professionals, and an existing global diaspora. Iranian refugees would likely integrate differently than Syrian ones.

But the scale number is real and it deserves to be stated plainly. Five to six million additional people arriving in countries that are already managing significant tensions around integration and identity is not an abstraction. It is a political and social challenge of the first order.

The 2015 Syrian refugee wave contributed directly to the rise of the Alternative for Germany party, which is now the second largest party in the German parliament. It contributed to Brexit. It contributed to the National Rally's breakthrough in France. A wave three to four times larger would produce political consequences that are genuinely unpredictable. Angela Merkel opened Germany's borders in 2015 and her party never recovered its former dominance. Friedrich Merz, who leads Germany today, has positioned himself explicitly as the corrective to Merkel's immigration policy. He would face pressure from every direction simultaneously: from humanitarian advocates demanding asylum, from the political right demanding closure, and from a Muslim community already present in Germany that would see co-religionists from a country just attacked by American and Israeli forces.

The Civilizational Question

I want to be careful here because it is easy to slide into territory that is both factually imprecise and morally ugly. Most Muslims in France, Germany, and Britain are not terrorists. Most are not sympathizers of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is a specifically Shia theocratic government that many Sunni Muslims regard with suspicion or outright hostility. Most want to live peaceable lives, raise their children, and be left alone. The same is true of Iranian refugees specifically, who have been fleeing the Islamic Republic in large numbers for decades precisely because they do not want to live under it.

The relevant question is not about individual Muslims. It is about institutional capacity and social cohesion.

A civilization that cannot honestly discuss what its own government inquiries found about the grooming gang crisis for fear of community reaction is a civilization that has lost something important. A civilization that jails women for angry tweets within weeks while refusing for decades to prosecute organized child rape gangs because the perpetrators were from a protected community has developed a pathology in its institutions. A civilization that watches its historic churches emptying while building more mosques than at any point in its history is undergoing a transformation it is not having an honest conversation about.
That is not an anti Muslim statement.

It is a statement about the failure of European institutions to be honest with their own populations about what is happening and what choices follow from it.

Britain helped create the conditions for the 1979 Iranian Revolution through the 1953 coup. It has spent the decades since managing the consequences of that history. Today it issues statements calling for diplomacy while the country it once toppled a government to control is being struck by American and Israeli warplanes. The wheel has turned a long way.

Whether Western Europe can manage another significant refugee wave without the kind of internal fracturing that would destabilize its democracies is one of the most important questions this war raises. The bombs are falling in Tehran, but the impacts could shake London and Paris and Berlin in a way that not enough people are reckoning with.

Check the comments for a story about the condemnation from our allies of our strikes.  The war in Iran may last weeks. The consequences for Europe could last generations. I will keep tracking what others are not saying.