The big Donald Trump foreign policy question heading into this week looked like it was going to be when and if the US was going to launch military strikes against Venezuela. That’s still a live question, but in the meantime, the president has threatened to attack an entirely different country on the other side of the Atlantic, vowing to send troops “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria if that country’s government fails to prevent the persecution of Christians.
It’s the latest example of how the Nobel Peace Prize aspirant and advocate of “America First” foreign policy is more than willing to use the threat of military force to accomplish his foreign policy goals, and to interfere in the domestic affairs of other countries, when doing so aligns with his domestic political priorities.
In this sense, the threat against Nigeria is similar to that against Venezuela, although the latter appears far more likely to actually be carried out. In both cases, the president appears to be contradicting his frequently expressed opposition to military interventionism, but these are interventions linked to the priorities of his political base: in one case, keeping drugs and migrants out of the US. In another, protecting Christians.
As we get deeper into Trump’s second term, it’s becoming increasingly clear that MAGA is not immune from the temptation to go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
What is actually happening in Nigeria?
The problem Trump is talking about here is a real one. The hardline Islamist terror group known as Boko Haram and its offshoots have waged a brutal insurgency against the Nigerian state in the northern part of the country since 2009, committing numerous high-profile massacres and kidnappings, including the 2014 Chibok schoolgirl abduction that attracted a global media campaign. This isn’t the only religious conflict going on. Recent years have also seen a wave of clashes and attacks between predominantly Muslim herders and predominantly Christian farming communities in Northwest and Northcentral Nigeria. The Nigerian military has been fighting the insurgency for years, but President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has been accused of ignoring the plight of Christians, in particular, and the military campaign has been hampered by widespread corruption and alleged human rights abuses.
In addition, several Nigerian states have some of the world’s most draconian blasphemy laws, which critics say are disproportionately enforced against Christians. Atheists and members of minority Muslim sects have been persecuted as well, though.
Trump’s sudden interest in Africa’s most populous country was likely motivated less by any particular event there — these are all longstanding issues — than by developments in Washington. Though it doesn’t get a ton of mainstream media attention, the plight of Christians in Nigeria has been a galvanizing issue for evangelical Christians in the US in recent years. When I went to see former Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari speak in Washington in 2022, the event was repeatedly interrupted by protesters. On Truth Social, Trump cited numbers from a report from the international Christian rights NGO Open Doors stating that of the 4,476 Christians killed for their faith globally in 2024, 3,100 were in Nigeria.
This also isn’t the first time Trump has taken an interest in the issue. When Buhari visited the White House during Trump’s first term in 2020, the president pointedly asked him, “Why are you killing Christians in Nigeria?” During Trump’s first term, the US added Nigeria to the State Department’s list of Countries of Particular Concern for violations of religious freedom. The Biden administration controversially removed Nigeria from the list in 2021, just before a visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the country, which is viewed by the US as both an important counterterrorism partner and a major political and economic player in Africa.
So it was not surprising to see Trump’s initial Truth Social post on Friday, that he was returning Nigeria to the CPC list.
The bipartisan US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), a bipartisan federal watchdog appointed by Congress and the White House, had been urging him to do so, as had recent legislation introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz. (R-Tex.), who has been consistently outspoken on the issue.
Mohamed Elsanousi, one of the USCIRF commissioners, told Vox that the commission welcomed Trump’s announcement and his highlighting of the killing of Christians, but added, “there are also violations and killings of Muslims and African traditional religion practitioners. So we would have loved for the President to mention all the other communities that are facing the same kind of persecutions as well.”
But Trump’s post on Saturday was more of a surprise, saying that the US military:
…may very well go into that now disgraced country, “guns-a-blazing,” to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities. I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action. If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!
“Yes sir,” tweeted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in response. Asked on Air Force One on Sunday if this could mean boots on the ground or airstrikes, Trump replied, “Could be. I mean, other things. I envisage a lot of things.”
Humanitarian intervention, MAGA style
It would be very surprising if Trump actually follows through on his threat. While hardly a pacifist, Trump prefers quick interventions that promise decisive victories and carry little risk of quagmire or US casualties. None of that applies in Nigeria. It’s probably relevant that the Nigerian government is not viewed particularly favorably by the Trump administration for a number of reasons, including its refusal to accept deported migrants from the US and its criticism of Israel over the war in Gaza.
It’s also a little strange to be debating whether “boots on the ground” would be the decisive factor in turning the tide against jihadists in West Africa. US troops have been involved in training and assistance missions with Western African countries, including Nigeria, for two decades now. Though the future of those missions is uncertain as more countries in the region turn toward security partnerships with Russia and as US foreign aid cuts hamper US efforts to try to stabilize countries where insurgencies are thriving.
It’s worth pointing out that in August, the administration approved $346 million in arms sales to the government it is now accusing of allowing the wholesale killing of Christians and of perpetrating its own human rights abuses. There are very good reasons to suggest the US should rethink a strategy of security assistance to Nigeria — it has plainly failed to put down Boko Haram’s insurgency — but little reason to believe a unilateral US military intervention would be much more effective.
Trump’s own statements suggest that he also believes this. In his speech in Saudi Arabia in May, he criticized past administrations for “intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” Addressing military commanders in Quantico in September, he vowed to restore “the fundamental principle that defending the homeland is the military’s first and most important priority” and argued that “Only in recent decades did politicians somehow come to believe that our job is to police the far reaches of Kenya and Somalia, while America is under invasion from within.”
And yet, now he is threatening to put the US military into the middle of a dizzyingly complex ethnic conflict in an African country that few in the US really understand.
It’s yet more evidence that for all his America First messaging, Trump is essentially a globalist: someone who believes the US plays an indispensable role on the world stage, and should play a role in solving global crises, including those with little relevance to America’s narrowly defined national security interests. But the big difference between Trump and the liberal internationalists or neoconservatives who came before him is the degree to which his foreign interventions are aligned with his domestic political priorities.
That can mean throwing US economic might behind a MAGA-friendly party in an Argentinian election or the trial of an ally in Brazil. It can mean revamping US refugee policy so that it predominantly helps white South Africans. It may soon mean a regime change campaign in Venezuela couched in the rhetoric of drug and migration policy. And in the case of Nigeria, it means reviving the supposedly discredited notion of humanitarian military intervention — but only in a case where it aligns with the priorities of one of Trump’s important constituencies.
In previous years, the grisly scenes emerging from El Fasher, Sudan, might have prompted a debate about the necessity of American military intervention. Don’t count on it in today’s Washington.
