Why is the US bombing Nigeria?

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<img alt="Two girls watch an armed soldier from behind a wall." data-caption="Two girls are pictured behind an armed soldier in the small village, that was destroyed by Boko Haram on December 19, 2022, in Ngarannam, Nigeria. | Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images" data-portal-copyright="Florian Gaertner/Photothek via Getty Images" data-has-syndication-rights="1" src="https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/11/gettyimages-1245752969.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100" /> Two ladies are pictured behind an armed soldier within the small village, that was destroyed by Boko Haram on December 19, 2022, in Ngarannam, Nigeria. | Florian Gaertner/Photothek by way of Getty Photos President Donald Trump rang in Christmas Day by ordering airstrikes in opposition to 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 in opposition to ISIS, which allegedly carried out deadly attacks against US troops and civilians around the globe 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 “concentrating on and viciously killing, primarily, harmless Christians at ranges not seen for a few years, and even Centuries!”

It’s the most recent instance of how the Nobel Peace Prize aspirant and advocate of “America First” international coverage is greater than prepared to make use of navy power to perform his international coverage targets, and to intervene within the home affairs of different nations, when doing so aligns along with his home political priorities.

On this sense, the actions in Nigeria are much like the continued navy build-up round Venezuela, the place navy strikes on land should still happen within the fast future. In each instances, the president seems to be contradicting his often 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 just isn't immune from the temptation to go abroad in search of 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 often called Boko Haram and its offshoots have waged a brutal insurgency in opposition to 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 fighting under the ISIS banner since round 2016.

This isn’t the one non secular battle occurring. Latest years have additionally seen a wave of clashes and attacks between predominantly Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities in Northwest and Northcentral Nigeria. The Nigerian navy has been combating 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 laws , which critics say are disproportionately enforced in opposition to Christians. Atheists and members of minority Muslim sects have been persecuted as effectively, although.

Trump’s sudden curiosity in Africa’s most populous nation was doubtless 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 difficulty 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 difficulty. When Buhari visited the White Home throughout Trump’s first time period in 2020, the president pointedly asked him, “Why are you killing Christians in Nigeria?” Throughout Trump’s first time period, the US added Nigeria to the State Division’s record of Nations of Specific Concern for violations of non secular freedom. The Biden administration controversially removed Nigeria from the list in 2021, simply earlier than a go to by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the nation, which is seen by the US as each an essential counterterrorism associate and a significant political and financial participant in Africa.

So it was not stunning to see Trump’s preliminary Truth Social post in November that he was returning Nigeria to the CPC list .

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 do so , as had recent legislation launched by Sen. Ted Cruz. (R-Tex.), who has been persistently outspoken on the problem.

Mohamed Elsanousi, one of many USCIRF commissioners, advised 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 are going through the identical sort of persecutions as effectively.”

Humanitarian intervention, MAGA model

Trump urged there could also be extra strikes, tweeting, “MERRY CHRISTMAS to all, together with the useless 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 quick interventions that promise decisive victories and carry little threat of quagmire or US casualties. None of that applies in Nigeria. It’s in all probability related that the Nigerian authorities just isn't seen notably favorably by the Trump administration for plenty of causes, together with its refusal to accept deported migrants from the US and its criticism of Israel over the war in Gaza .

It’s notable that regardless of Trump’s earlier threats and allegations concentrating on Nigeria’s authorities, these strikes have been carried out in coordination with that authorities, in response to statements from each capitals. That is, subsequently, extra in line with the “over-the-horizon” counterterrorist strikes the US commonly carries out in coordination with allies in varied nations reasonably than the invasion by power of Nigeria that Trump’s statements final fall urged.

US troops have been concerned in coaching and help missions with Western African nations, together with Nigeria, for twenty years now. Although the way forward for these missions is unsure as extra nations within the area turn toward security partnerships with Russia and as US foreign aid cuts hamper US efforts to attempt to stabilize nations the place insurgencies are thriving.

It’s price stating that in August, the administration authorised $346 million in arms sales to the federal government it's now accusing of permitting the wholesale killing of Christians and of perpetrating its own human rights abuses . There are superb causes to counsel the US ought to rethink a method of safety help to Nigeria — it has plainly didn't put down Boko Haram’s insurgency — however little cause to consider US airstrikes might be rather more efficient.

Trump’s personal statements counsel that he additionally believes this. In his speech in Saudi Arabia in Might, he criticized previous administrations for “intervening in advanced 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 essential precedence” and argued that “Solely in latest many years did politicians someway 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 navy 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 essentially a globalist : somebody who believes the US performs an indispensable function 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 economic might behind a MAGA-friendly get together in an Argentinian election or the trial of an ally in Brazil . It may imply revamping US refugee coverage in order that it predominantly helps white South Africans . It could quickly imply a regime change 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 considered one of Trump’s essential constituencies.

In earlier years, the grisly scenes emerging from El Fasher, Sudan in latest months, might need prompted a debate in regards to the necessity of American navy intervention. Don’t depend on it in at this time’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 replicate the airstrikes on December 25.