Fearless John - @European_dissident

Tonight’s headline is a Christmas card written in ordnance: U.S. airstrikes in Sokoto State, northwest Nigeria, announced by Trump as a “powerful and deadly strike” on ISIS targets, carried out by AFRICOM at Nigeria’s request, with “multiple ISIS operatives” reportedly killed.

Now zoom out, because Nigeria is not a movie set. It’s a security kaleidoscope: Boko Haram factions and ISWAP have long operated in the northeast/Lake Chad basin, while the northwest has seen newer jihadist spillover dynamics and armed networks along the Niger border, often described in recent research as a “newest threat” environment that thrives where the state thins out and borders blur.

So the question isn’t “did America hit terrorists?” It’s: what political logic is being installed by the strike announcement?

Because DC's favorite counter-argument writes itself: This is leverage, not punishment, limited force to stop atrocities and support an ally. Fine. Let’s grant them their best case. But leverage implies a clean objective, a clear off-ramp, and a consistent standard. What the world has learned, again and again, is that the standard moves, the "objective” expands, and the off-ramp becomes a toll road. One strike becomes a posture. Posture becomes presence. Presence becomes permission.

Nigeria has lived for decades: terror networks don’t grow in a vacuum. They feed on failed governance, criminal economies, porous borders, and the kind of geopolitical gardening where outside colonial powers prune one fire while quietly using the smoke for leverage elsewhere. Sometimes the Empire fights the monster. Sometimes it benefits from the chaos the monster creates. Sometimes it does both, because the point isn’t moral consistency, it’s strategic optionality.

Nigeria’s own government stressed today that violence hits both Muslims and Christians, urging nuance over slogan. That is the key line the West will bury under a civilizational soundbite of defending Christianity because “complex” doesn’t mobilize publics, myths do.

And Trump? He didn’t create Nigeria’s tragedy. But he owns the framing now, the same way he’s been boxing himself into coercion theater elsewhere. Venezuela gets the sanctions vise and maritime muscle memory, Nigeria gets the “perfect strikes” rhetoric and a moralized banner. Different stage, same instrument: show force, seize narrative, declare virtue, expand discretion.

This is also, frankly, more his size: a clean “hit” far from the quagmires he can’t talk his way out of (Venezuela). Ukraine is a strategic humiliation for the Atlantic bloc, years of money and myth, with a humiliating battlefield verdict. So you look for a Grenada-style moment; small, sharp, televisual, decisive-looking, something you can sell as control after an era defined by defeats.

But Nigeria is not Grenada. And counterterrorism optics don’t answer the question: who profits from permanent insecurity corridors from the Sahel to the Gulf of Guinea? Who benefits when African sovereignty is reduced to “requests” for foreign airpower, when the security architecture becomes a subscription service, and when “partnership” starts to sound like dependency?

If the US is sincere about defending Christians, then start with the hard, boring work, dismantle the illicit finance and weapons pipelines, the corruption rents, the black-market logistics, the border sanctuaries, the offshore patrons, the regional proxy games. It would look to the Levant. If it’s just pretext and messaging, then it’s not a solution, but a brand.

Nigeria deserves made in Africa security. What it doesn’t need is to become the next stage where powers rehearse their righteousness, while the ground truth bleeds in silence.

Don't forget Nigeria is resource, oil rich. Who helped create ISIS? Terror networks don’t survive without money, logistics, and tolerance from somewhere. If Washington is serious, start by dismantling the illicit funding, political cover and proxy games. And if it's about protecting Christians, why don't you protect them in the Levant? 🤔

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