President Donald Trump rang in Christmas Day by ordering airstrikes towards two ISIS camps in Nigeria. The strikes, involving greater than a dozen Tomahawk missiles fired from a Navy ship, got here shortly after Trump vowed retaliation towards ISIS, which allegedly carried out lethal assaults towards US troops and civilians world wide final week.
However Trump has been speaking about navy motion in Nigeria, particularly, since November, when he vowed on social media to go “guns-a-blazing” into the nation if its authorities failed to stop the persecution of Christians.
In his publish asserting the strikes on Christmas, Trump accused ISIS of “focusing on and viciously killing, primarily, harmless Christians at ranges not seen for a few years, and even Centuries!”
It’s the newest instance of how the Nobel Peace Prize aspirant and advocate of “America First” international coverage is greater than keen to make use of navy pressure to perform his international coverage objectives, and to intervene within the home affairs of different international locations, when doing so aligns along with his home political priorities.
On this sense, the actions in Nigeria are much like the continuing navy build-up round Venezuela, the place navy strikes on land should still happen within the speedy future. In each instances, the president seems to be contradicting his regularly expressed opposition to navy interventionism, however these are interventions linked to the priorities of his political base: in a single case, retaining medicine and migrants out of the US. In one other, defending Christians.
As we get deeper into Trump’s second time period, it’s changing into more and more clear that MAGA isn’t immune from the temptation to go overseas seeking monsters to destroy.
What is definitely taking place in Nigeria?
The issue Trump is speaking about here’s a actual one. The hardline Islamist terror group generally known as Boko Haram and its offshoots have waged a brutal insurgency towards the Nigerian state within the northern a part of the nation since 2009, committing quite a few high-profile massacres and kidnappings, together with the 2014 Chibok schoolgirl abduction that attracted a world media marketing campaign. A Boko Haram splinter group has been preventing underneath the ISIS banner since round 2016.
This isn’t the one spiritual battle occurring. Current years have additionally seen a wave of clashes and assaults between predominantly Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities in Northwest and Northcentral Nigeria. The Nigerian navy has been preventing the insurgency for years, however President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been accused of ignoring the plight of Christians, particularly, and the navy marketing campaign has been hampered by widespread corruption and alleged human rights abuses.
As well as, a number of Nigerian states have a number of the world’s most draconian blasphemy legal guidelines, which critics say are disproportionately enforced towards Christians. Atheists and members of minority Muslim sects have been persecuted as properly, although.
Trump’s sudden curiosity in Africa’s most populous nation was seemingly motivated much less by any explicit occasion there — these are all longstanding points — than by developments in Washington. Although it doesn’t get a ton of mainstream media consideration, the plight of Christians in Nigeria has been a galvanizing situation for evangelical Christians within the US in recent times. Once I went to see former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari communicate in Washington in 2022, the occasion was repeatedly interrupted by protesters. On Reality Social, Trump has cited numbers from a report from the worldwide Christian rights NGO Open Doorways stating that of the 4,476 Christians killed for his or her religion globally in 2024, 3,100 had been in Nigeria.
This additionally isn’t the primary time Trump has taken an curiosity within the situation. When Buhari visited the White Home throughout Trump’s first time period in 2020, the president pointedly requested him, “Why are you killing Christians in Nigeria?” Throughout Trump’s first time period, the US added Nigeria to the State Division’s listing of International locations of Specific Concern for violations of spiritual freedom. The Biden administration controversially eliminated Nigeria from the listing in 2021, simply earlier than a go to by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the nation, which is considered by the US as each an vital counterterrorism companion and a significant political and financial participant in Africa.
So it was not stunning to see Trump’s preliminary Reality Social publish in November that he was returning Nigeria to the CPC listing.
The bipartisan US Fee on Worldwide Non secular Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan federal watchdog appointed by Congress and the White Home, had been urging him to take action, as had latest laws launched by Sen. Ted Cruz. (R-Tex.), who has been persistently outspoken on the problem.
Mohamed Elsanousi, one of many USCIRF commissioners, instructed Vox that the fee welcomed Trump’s announcement and his highlighting of the killing of Christians, however added, “there are additionally violations and killings of Muslims and African conventional faith practitioners. So we might have beloved for the President to say all the opposite communities which might be dealing with the identical type of persecutions as properly.”
Humanitarian intervention, MAGA type
Trump advised there could also be extra strikes, tweeting, “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, together with the lifeless Terrorists, of which there might be many extra if their slaughter of Christians continues.”
Nonetheless, an prolonged counterinsurgency marketing campaign in Nigeria appears unlikely. Whereas hardly a pacifist, Trump prefers fast interventions that promise decisive victories and carry little danger of quagmire or US casualties. None of that applies in Nigeria. It’s in all probability related that the Nigerian authorities isn’t considered significantly favorably by the Trump administration for a lot of causes, together with its refusal to settle for deported migrants from the US and its criticism of Israel over the battle in Gaza.
It’s notable that regardless of Trump’s earlier threats and allegations focusing on Nigeria’s authorities, these strikes had been carried out in coordination with that authorities, in keeping with statements from each capitals. That is, due to this fact, extra in step with the “over-the-horizon” counterterrorist strikes the US commonly carries out in coordination with allies in numerous international locations reasonably than the invasion by pressure of Nigeria that Trump’s statements final fall advised.
US troops have been concerned in coaching and help missions with Western African international locations, together with Nigeria, for twenty years now. Although the way forward for these missions is unsure as extra international locations within the area flip towards safety partnerships with Russia and as US international support cuts hamper US efforts to attempt to stabilize international locations the place insurgencies are thriving.
It’s price declaring that in August, the administration authorised $346 million in arms gross sales to the federal government it’s now accusing of permitting the wholesale killing of Christians and of perpetrating its personal human rights abuses. There are superb causes to recommend the US ought to rethink a technique of safety help to Nigeria — it has plainly did not put down Boko Haram’s insurgency — however little cause to consider US airstrikes might be way more efficient.
Trump’s personal statements recommend that he additionally believes this. In his speech in Saudi Arabia in Could, he criticized previous administrations for “intervening in complicated societies that they didn’t even perceive themselves.” Addressing navy commanders in Quantico in September, he vowed to revive “the basic precept that defending the homeland is the navy’s first and most vital precedence” and argued that “Solely in latest a long time did politicians someway come to consider that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia, whereas America is underneath invasion from inside.”
And but now he’s placing the US navy into the center of a dizzyingly complicated ethnic battle in an African nation that few within the US actually perceive.
It’s but extra proof that for all his America First messaging, Trump is basically a globalist: somebody who believes the US performs an indispensable position on the world stage, and will play a job in fixing international crises, together with these with little relevance to America’s narrowly outlined nationwide safety pursuits. However the huge distinction between Trump and the liberal internationalists or neoconservatives who got here earlier than him is the diploma to which his international interventions are aligned along with his home political priorities.
That may imply throwing US financial may behind a MAGA-friendly celebration in an Argentinian election or the trial of an ally in Brazil. It could imply revamping US refugee coverage in order that it predominantly helps white South Africans. It might quickly imply a regime change marketing campaign in Venezuela couched within the rhetoric of drug and migration coverage. And within the case of Nigeria, it means reviving the supposedly discredited notion of humanitarian navy intervention — however solely in a case the place it aligns with the priorities of certainly one of Trump’s vital constituencies.
In earlier years, the grisly scenes rising from El Fasher, Sudan in latest months, might need prompted a debate concerning the necessity of American navy intervention. Don’t rely on it in in the present day’s Washington.
Replace, December 26, 2025, 12:10 pm: This text was initially printed in November after President Donald Trump made his preliminary feedback threatening navy motion in Nigeria, and was up to date to mirror the airstrikes on December 25.
