The president has begun talking about launching attacks on targets in Nigeria:
And on Sunday, Trump reiterated that his country could deploy troops to Nigeria or carry out airstrikes to stop the alleged killings.
“They’re killing record numbers of Christians in Nigeria. They’re killing the Christians and killing them in very large numbers. We’re not going to allow that to happen,” the US president said.
In Saturday’s post he warned that he might send the military into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” unless the Nigerian government intervened, and said that all aid to what he called “the now disgraced country” would be cut.
Trump is misrepresenting what is happening in Nigeria, but U.S. military intervention in Nigeria for any reason makes no sense. The U.S. certainly shouldn’t intervene in Nigeria without the Nigerian government’s consent. Our government shouldn’t be looking for new reasons to increase American military involvement in west Africa. U.S. policy in the region has mostly strengthened militarism in partner countries, and that has fueled conflicts in one country after another. Direct U.S. intervention is not the answer.
Intervention in Nigeria is a bad idea for the United States, but it is arguably even worse for people in Nigeria. U.S. “assistance” against armed insurgencies in Africa has not delivered greater security for the people, but it has undermined democratic governments and enabled human rights abuses. U.S. involvement in African conflicts in the name of counterterrorism has typically produced worsening conditions for the affected countries. The Intercept reported on this failure earlier in the year:
A new Pentagon report offers the grimmest assessment yet of the results of the last 10 years of U.S. military efforts on the continent. It corroborates years of reporting on catastrophes that U.S. Africa Command has long attempted to ignore or cover up.
Fatalities from militant Islamist violence spiked over the years of America’s most vigorous counterterrorism efforts on the continent, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement — Somalia and the West African Sahel — suffering the worst outcomes.
An armed intervention for ostensibly humanitarian reasons would likely fare no better. We should remember how U.S. and allied intervention in Libya contributed to regional instability and conflict, including some of the very threats that now threaten to swallow Mali. Considering how reckless and indiscriminate the administration’s strikes in other campaigns have been, it is a safe bet that U.S. strikes in Nigeria would also kill many civilians.
