President Donald Trump is toying around with the idea of yet another war. He said Saturday that he has instructed the Pentagon to “prepare for possible action” in Nigeria because he claims the West African nation is failing to protect Christians from violence there.
“If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the U.S.A. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and 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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded to the post with “yes sir” and added, “The killing of innocent Christians in Nigeria — and anywhere — must end immediately.”
Trump is pushing a strange, inaccurate narrative about Nigeria.
The likelihood of American boots on the ground — which Trump declined to rule out when asked about it by a reporter — is low. But Trump’s latest bellicose rhetoric provides insight into the way he thinks about foreign policy, and deals yet another blow to the already-battered “peace president” narrative his administration has peddled in a vain attempt to secure him a Nobel Peace Prize.
Trump is pushing a strange, inaccurate narrative about Nigeria, which has roughly equal-sized populations of Christians and Muslims. Armed conflict in the northeast of the country, which is a majority Muslim region, has gone on for more than 15 years and is not targeted systematically at Christians.
Bloomberg reports that “the reality is that ethnic violence in Nigeria is driven by access to resources, such as land and water, and terrorism by the likes of Boko Haram and the Islamic state — that largely kills Muslims.” Bloomberg observed that “while there is religious violence in Nigeria, most of it is based on resources and criminality.”
Kimiebi Imomotimi Ebienfa, a spokesman for Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that “We are not proud of the security situation that we are passing through, but to go with the narrative” that only Christians are targeted, “is not true. There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria.” He added, “We acknowledge the fact that there are killings that have taken place in Nigeria, but those killings were not restricted to Christians alone. Muslims are being killed. Traditional worshippers are being killed. … The majority is not the Christian population.”
Trump’s misleading rhetoric is not surprising. But what’s more unexpected is that his rhetoric almost sounds neoconservative, in that he’s threatening to intervene in another country on behalf of defending values rather than strict geopolitical interests or claims of self-defense. Why misrepresent facts on the ground in Nigeria? It’s likely that Trump thinks this rhetoric will excite the evangelical part of his coalition, which is generally receptive to messages about Christian persecution around the world. Trump’s rhetoric also appears to parallel his claims that white farmers in South Africa are enduring a genocide in South Africa — and his offering them special refugee status in the States. “Christian” and “white” are not the same thing, but the narratives are analogous in that, in the right-wing American imagination, they are proxies for Western civilization in Africa.
Trump’s future behavior toward Nigeria, which he has now designated a “country of particular concern” over alleged violations of religious freedom, is impossible to predict. But it’s yet another example of how Trump’s “America First” ideology is neither isolationist nor peace-loving.