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 around the globe final week.
However Trump has been speaking about army 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 forestall the persecution of Christians.
In his publish saying 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” overseas coverage is greater than keen to make use of army drive to perform his overseas coverage objectives, and to intrude 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 army build-up round Venezuela, the place army strikes on land should still happen within the fast future. In each instances, Trump seems to be contradicting his incessantly expressed opposition to army interventionism, however these are interventions linked to the priorities of his political base: in a single case, holding medication and migrants out of the US. In one other, defending Christians.
As we get deeper into Trump’s second time period, it’s turning into more and more clear that MAGA shouldn’t be immune from the temptation to go overseas looking for 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 combating below the ISIS banner since round 2016.
This isn’t the one non secular battle happening. Current years have additionally seen a wave of clashes and assaults between predominantly Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities in Northwest and North Central Nigeria. The Nigerian army has been combating the insurgency for years, however President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been accused of ignoring the plight of Christians, particularly, and the army marketing campaign has been hampered by widespread corruption and alleged human rights abuses.
As well as, a number of Nigerian states have among 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 nicely, although.
Trump’s sudden curiosity in Africa’s most populous nation was possible motivated much less by any specific 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 concern for evangelical Christians within the US in recent times. Once I went to see former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari converse in Washington in 2022, the occasion was repeatedly interrupted by protesters. On Fact 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 have been in Nigeria.
This additionally isn’t the primary time Trump has taken an curiosity within the concern. 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 checklist of International locations of Explicit Concern for violations of spiritual freedom. The Biden administration controversially eliminated Nigeria from the checklist 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 necessary counterterrorism associate and a serious political and financial participant in Africa.
So it was not shocking to see Trump’s preliminary Fact Social publish in November that he was returning Nigeria to the CPC checklist.
The bipartisan US Fee on Worldwide Spiritual Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan federal watchdog appointed by Congress and the White Home, had been urging him to take action, as had current laws launched by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who has been persistently outspoken on the difficulty.
Mohamed Elsanousi, one of many USCIRF commissioners, informed 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 liked for the President to say all the opposite communities which might be going through the identical type of persecutions as nicely.”
Humanitarian intervention, MAGA fashion
Trump steered there could also be extra strikes, tweeting, “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, together with the useless Terrorists, of which there can 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 threat of quagmire or US casualties. None of that applies in Nigeria. It’s most likely related that the Nigerian authorities shouldn’t be 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 struggle in Gaza.
It’s notable that regardless of Trump’s earlier threats and allegations focusing on Nigeria’s authorities, these strikes have been carried out in coordination with that authorities, based on statements from each capitals. That is, subsequently, extra in step with the “over-the-horizon” counterterrorist strikes the US often carries out in coordination with allies in varied international locations relatively than the invasion by drive of Nigeria that Trump’s statements final fall steered.
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 overseas help cuts hamper US efforts to attempt to stabilize international locations the place insurgencies are thriving.
It’s value mentioning that in August, the administration accepted $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 excellent causes to counsel the US ought to rethink a method of safety help to Nigeria — it has plainly did not put down Boko Haram’s insurgency — however little purpose to consider US airstrikes can be far more efficient.
Trump’s personal statements counsel that he additionally believes this. In his speech in Saudi Arabia in Could, he criticized previous administrations for “intervening in advanced societies that they didn’t even perceive themselves.” Addressing army commanders in Quantico in September, he vowed to revive “the basic precept that defending the homeland is the army’s first and most necessary precedence” and argued that “Solely in current many years did politicians in some way come to consider that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia, whereas America is below invasion from inside.”
And but now he’s placing the US army into the center of a dizzyingly advanced 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 actually a globalist: somebody who believes the US performs an indispensable function on the world stage, and may play a task in fixing international crises, together with these with little relevance to America’s narrowly outlined nationwide safety pursuits. However the massive distinction between Trump and the liberal internationalists or neoconservatives who got here earlier than him is the diploma to which his overseas interventions are aligned along with his home political priorities.
That may imply throwing US financial may behind a MAGA-friendly occasion in an Argentinian election or the trial of an ally in Brazil. It might probably imply revamping US refugee coverage in order that it predominantly helps white South Africans. It could 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 army intervention — however solely in a case the place it aligns with the priorities of certainly one of Trump’s necessary constituencies.
In earlier years, the grisly scenes rising from El Fasher, Sudan in current months, might need prompted a debate in regards to the necessity of American army intervention. Don’t rely on it in as we speak’s Washington.
Replace, December 26, 2025, 12:10 pm ET: This text was initially revealed in November after President Donald Trump made his preliminary feedback threatening army motion in Nigeria, and was up to date to replicate the airstrikes on December 25.
