The Devil’s Chickens Back in the Barnyard?

Ron Jacobs

 December 1, 2025

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Two National Guardsmen photographed while stationed outside the southern Farragut North station entrance. Photograph Source: Pbritti – CC BY 4.0

The death of the National Guard soldier Sgt. Beckstrom in Washington, DC was an easily averted tragedy that should never have occurred. To begin with, the Guard should never have been deployed in DC. Their presence in the District was motivated by some combination of Trump’s racism, his hatred of Democrats and the fascist posturing of Stephen Miller, Peter Hegseth and the rest of the White House sycophant crowd. Instead of her parents spending their holiday in a hospital room praying their daughter would survive, the family should have been celebrating it at their home in West Virginia. That’s the obvious element of this tragedy that didn’t have to be.

The less obvious element, yet more fundamental one, is who the alleged shooter was and what history could have brought him to commit the murder. When one delves into this part of the story, the story they discover is one that indicts not jut the alleged killer, but the Pentagon, the White House, Congress, the CIA and the US political system; in other words, the US war machine. Let’s start somewhere near the beginning.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the accused shooter, was twenty-nine years old. That means he was born in 1996 and was five years old when the events of 9-11 occurred. That also means he was five years old when the US attacked his country of birth and began a war and occupation and war that encompassed his entire life. Sometime in his late teens or early twenties, he signed up with the invaders’ army, joining a program that featured units known as National Strike Units—known colloquially as Zero Units—that was composed of death squads whose task was killing those deemed to be targets by the invaders. Many of the killings undertaken by these groups were face to face—no bombs or missiles coming from the sky or ordnance fired from tanks and armored personnel carriers; just straight up killing of Afghans by other Afghans and all directed by US Special Forces and the CIA. Human Rights Watch published a report on October 31, 2019 titled “They’ve Shot Many Like This,’ which detailed fourteen incidents these death squads were involved in. Many others were left out of the report, while many more were probably never reported or the paper trail was erased. The psychological effects of this kind of killing are well-documented by military psychologists around the world. Many US families that include veterans know these effects all too well.

Afghanistan was not the first theater of war where Washington hired locals for its death squads. Tens of thousands of Vietnamese were killed under what was called the Phoenix Program, a program known among US warmakers at the time as a civilian assassination program. Similar programs were used in Iraq, including one known as Task Force 121, which, according to the Guardian newspaper secretly worked together with Israeli Defense Forces targeting and killing insurgent groups and civilians during the height of combat in Iraq (Dec. 8,2003). The latter program was often referred to as the Salvador option—a reference to US-trained death squads working together with the El Salvadoran military and US special forces in the civil war in El Salvador during the 1980s. A former Marine I know worked with some Afghan squads during his tour of duty west of Kabul near Herat. His stories of his time there indicate that the Afghans were part of this program; they did most of the killing and capturing of those deemed the enemy. The US troops were charged with providing location information, weapons and with transporting those captured back to detention and interrogation centers. These centers usually involved the presence of CIA agents and Afghans working with the CIA. Torture was often part of the interrogation regimen. Another man I know works with Afghan resettlement programs in the Baltimore-Washington region. His work mostly involves finding housing for those refugees, helping them register their children in school and helping adults find work. He has told me of the frustration and anger felt by those who killed for Washington in Afghanistan and are now trying to find work that provides them with enough money to support their families. Men like the alleged killer Lakanwal were paid fairly well while they served as hit men for the Pentagon in Afghanistan. If they find work in the US, their pay certainly doesn’t go as far as their pay in Afghanistan went.

None of the above is meant to excuse the actions for which Mr. Lakanwal is accused of. However, it is meant to provide some context for them. Of course, we may never truly know why he shot the troops in Washington, DC. Their presence on the streets of DC, while of questionable legality and utility, was not the cause of whatever problems he might have had. If anything, the military presence in DC and Lakanwal’s life in the United States share a common cause—US militarism. The arrogance of a nation whose history is defined by endless war and an ever-vaster war machine is why the National Guard is walking the streets of DC fully armed and why Mr. Lakanwal killed his countrymen and ended up in the United States after his side lost the war in Afghanistan. The White House (like so many administrations before it) decided to spend millions on a show of force instead of addressing the issues that created whatever situation the National Guard was sent to address in DC. It seems redundant to remind the reader that Washington was the primary reason the war in Afghanistan occurred in the first place. It is also why that the war went on for as long as it did. One can certainly paint Donald Trump as a villain for his deployment of US troops into US cities (among a multitude of other criminal actions), but pretending that he’s an anomaly is misrepresenting the truth. The US government was a criminal organization long before Donald Trump ran for office in 2016. This is especially true as regards its foreign policy. Perhaps it was this criminality that convinced Mr. Trump to run for office, given his penchant for activities of questionable morality and his dismissal of the law when it doesn’t serve his designs.

After US president John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Black liberation leader Malcolm X observed, “l don’t think anybody here would deny that when you send chickens out in the morning from your barnyard, those chickens will return that evening to your barnyard, not your neighbor’s barnyard. I think this is a prime example of the devil’s chickens coming back home to roost. That the chickens that he sent out, the violence that he’s perpetrated in other countries, here and abroad, four children in Birmingham, or Medgar Evers, or the mangrove in Africa. I think this same violence has come back to claim one of their own.” Over sixty years later, violence perpetrated by the US in other counties has intensified exponentially and shows no sign of diminishing—with US warplanes doing overflights of Venezuela, an armada of warships shooting civilians in the Caribbean and prepping for a greater onslaught, more CIA operations underway inside Venezuela, the usual misadventures in tandem with Israel in Palestine and the rest of the region some call the Middle East and now with US forces kidnapping, detaining and occasionally shooting US residents in the cities where they live. There may soon not be enough room on the roosting bars if more and more of those chickens make their way back to the barnyard we call the United States.

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com

 

Harry Truman, Hiroshima and the Necessity Defense

By Kary Love

November 28, 2025

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image by Truman Library, in public domain

“How sharper than a serpents tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

So King Lear teaches parents. I, unlike Lear, have been blessed with thankful children. One of my daughters rented for her mother’s birthday a “place” (so she said) in Key West, Florida, also known as the “Conch Republic” for its aspirational secession from the USA. Her mom had been caring for her 97-year-old mother for several years and really needed a rest and recuperation break.

We arrived late on Saturday night and I had not checked the place out so I was in for a shock when I woke up Sunday Morning for my daily Constitutional hike. I exited the gate and directly across the street was the “Harry Truman Key West White House.” I had been reading about recent state court cases (in Chicago) where peaceable protesters against the genocide in Gaza had raised the necessity defense. Because I had spent decades trying to raise the necessity defense in US Federal Courts on behalf of peaceable prayers against nuclear bombs on US military arsenals carrying overkill capacity of exterminating the humans on earth more than 30 times, I of course started thinking: “Would Harry Truman be able to raise the necessity defense before the Throne Of Judgment for his Hiroshima or Nagasaki A-bombing in support of his petition to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?” And so my morning walk turned into a thought experiment.

Now I am not a christian because “loving your enemies” is way too tough a call for a weak reed such as me. But Harry T claimed he was a dyed-in-the-wool believer who had taken Jesus as his savior. So, given what Jesus Christ preached in Galilee I wondered—how did Harry expect to “enter the kingdom of Heaven” after nuking Hiroshima and following it up with Nagasaki, neither city being military targets but civilian cities mostly occupied by children, women and the elderly, as most military-age men were already in the Japanese Imperial Army on the verge of defeat?

The necessity defense is recognized in American law. In sum the argument is: one has the privilege to commit a lesser, or minor crime, in order to prevent a greater crime. There are other technicalities bolted on by various courts over time, but that is the key question. For example, a sailor, such as me, with a boat full of landlubbers gets hit by an unpredicted gale out on the open sea. Desperately seeking safety for my passengers, I head to shore. I see a dock plastered with “Do Not Trespass” signs and skulls and crossbones threatening “violators will be persecuted” er, prosecuted.

Fearing the hurricane like wind and waves are going to sink my boat and drown the little children on board, I decide I have no choice but to commit trespass in order to avoid the greater crime of drowning children. So I dock. The kids live and everything is copacetic til the dock owner calls the cops and maybe ICE (on the black and brown kids on board).

In such a case I can argue (in state courts) the “defense of necessity” made me do it. And often juries acquit if such prosecutions get so far. Most necessity defenses even in state court fail because juries often do not like it when somebody “takes the law into their own hands.” Of course all human laws were made by someone taking the law into their own hands way back in the dawn of civilization, when human law emerged from the law of the jungle. But modern people have learned to bow to the law made by legislatures and enforced by police to the point of absurdity and often abandon their own judgment, deferring to their “betters” who got elected to legislatures.

So, back to Harry. He is charged with mass murder of kids, women and old people, and seeks to defend his petition to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Can he successfully argue “necessity” (assuming arguendo god rejects the idea that “just war” justifies any crimes committed during war; not even human law does that). Will Harry win his case before the “Throne of Judgment?” On my walk I imagined Harry was prosecuted by Lucifer and was rejected by every major law firm who refused to take up his defense. Finally, out of desperation to give Harry a fair trial, god appointed Jesus as “attorney for the damned.”

I don’t know how such a case would turn out, though much recent evidence suggests the A-bombings were not justified by “military necessity,” and Harry actually used the A-bombings to scare off the USSR from expansionist planning because only the US of A had the A-bomb. If the latter is correct, I suspect god would not buy the argument the necessity defense was successful because USSR’s expansionist plans versus USA’s similar hopes seems merely an argument about which robber should control a territory. It reminds me of the Dylan tune “Masters of War” which concludes even “Jesus would never forgive what you do,” concerning the builders of weapons of mass destruction.

Anyway, I do not have an answer for you; you have to decide whether Harry Truman has god on his side. (Thanks Bob) As for me, I am grateful to have thankful children. And I am writing a play: Harry Truman, Hiroshima and the Necessity Defense” to more fully explore the question.

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Kary Love, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Michigan attorney who has defended nuclear resisters and many others in court for decades.Email

 

Trump’s Beef With Nigeria

Trump’s threats of military action against Nigeria are not about Christian genocide, but are about rare earths, China, and the scramble to control Africa’s mineral future.

By Yusuf Bangura

November 29, 2025

Source: Africa Is A Country

Presidents Trump and Buhari at the White House in 2018. Official White House photo credit Andrea Hanks via Flickr CC0.

The widely circulated article in Global Geopolitics, “America’s Hypocrisy as Policy,” offers a thoughtful reaction to US President Donald Trump’s insane but self-serving threat to invade Nigeria under the pretext of stopping a so-called Christian genocide. Trump tweeted on 31 October 31 and November 1st 2025 that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” named Nigeria as “a country of particular concern,” and announced that the US was “ready, willing and able to save our Great Christian population around the World.” He also ordered the military to prepare to intervene in Nigeria and boasted that “if we attack, it will be fast, vicious and sweet.”

Trump has often been described as a narcissist—someone who is deeply self-infatuated and impulsively seeks attention and adulation. Earlier this year, John MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s magazine, writing in The Guardian, described him instead as a solipsist—a word he borrowed from the investigative psychiatrist Robert Lifton. A solipsist is someone who makes no attempt to court or please others, since the only point of reference is himself. Solipsists revel in making outrageous statements because they love being attacked to draw attention to themselves.

It is easy to dismiss Trump’s inflamed anti-Nigeria rhetoric as the rants of a narcissist or solipsist, since anyone who is familiar with Nigeria knows that the violence in that country affects both Christians and Muslims. “He cannot be serious,” some have argued. However, his insanity or wild outbursts may not be without material foundation. Trump often follows through on his rants if he does not face stiff resistance—especially when his anger is directed at groups, individuals or institutions he considers weak.

There are always interests and a method in his madness or egotistical rants. As the Global Geopolitics article notes, Nigeria is located within a resource-rich region that is important to the supply chains of US hi-tech companies and defense industries. That region stretches from Nigeria through Niger and Chad to Sudan and is endowed with vast amounts of rare earth minerals.

Apart from oil, Nigeria has enormous reserves of lithium, cobalt, nickel and other rare earths, which are embedded in solid rock and heavy mineral sands. It is ranked fifth globally in the production of rare earth elements—behind China, the US, Myanmar and Australia. Segun Adeyemi recently reported in Business Insider Africa that Chinese companies have invested more than USD 1.3 billion in Nigeria’s fast-growing lithium-processing industry. Combined with the leverage that Russia now wields in the mineral-rich Sahel states of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, China’s growing economic influence in West Africa’s regional power, Nigeria, should be of serious concern to the US, since China already dominates the global rare earths industry.

The US has been strategizing about how to end its high level of dependence on China for rare earths, which are essential for clean energy, such as electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines, and in electronic consumer products, such as LED television screens, computers and smart phones. These minerals are also required to produce jet engines, missile guidance and defense systems, satellites and GPS equipment.

After threatening China with a 140 per cent tariff when China imposed restrictions on the global supply of rare earths, Trump quickly made a U-turn in his recent meeting with China’s president, Xi. He realized that a trade war with China on rare earths would profoundly hurt the US economy. Under the deal he struck with Xi, Trump agreed to end the tariff threat and lift the ban on Chinese companies’ access to US chips, while Xi agreed to restart China’s supply of rare earths and purchase US soybeans for one year. Trump praised Xi as a great leader when he returned to the US.

The US is in panic mode in the geopolitics of rare earths trade. On his recent visit to Southeast Asia, Trump signed a raft of agreements with several countries in the region to beef up the production and processing of rare earths and exports to the US.

Various reports by experts in geopolitics indicate that the Trump administration sees Africa as an important source of critical minerals that will help wean the US off China. The administration brokered a peace deal between the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda in June 2025, which included an investment agreement that allows the US to invest in DRC’s minerals.

Deals with other countries, such as Kenya, Tanzania, Angola, Malawi and Namibia are being discussed or supported. In 2022, the US and other Western countries launched a fourteen-member minerals security partnership (MSP) to boost the production and supply of critical minerals that will benefit member states. The MSP works with the multilateral financial institutions and export credit agencies to provide finance for specific projects. It holds forums with a number of countries that produce rare earths, including the DRC, Botswana and Zambia.

What does the US really want?

The history of the US’s quest for foreign resources indicates that it uses multiple strategies, such as coercion, war, bribery and diplomacy, to achieve its goals. Coercion involves suspending aid or other economic benefits and political support to compel an adversary to bend to the will of the US.

When Trump suspended the US’s aid program and declared a trade war with the rest of the world in April 2025, several African and other leaders rushed to make deals with him. Global Witness revealed in July 2025, that seventeen countries (including six from Africa—i.e Angola, DRC, Liberia, Mozambique, Rwanda and Somalia) have hired Trump loyalists as lobbyists to help broker deals, “with many bartering key resources including minerals in exchange for humanitarian or military support.”

The use of war to pursue US strategic and economic interests is well documented in the field of geopolitics and international political economy. During the Cold War, the US and other Western countries simply intervened in countries that threatened their vital interests without bothering to disguise their actions with lofty humanitarian objectives.

One of the most famous cases was the US invasion of Guatemala in 1954 to stop the land reform programme by Jacobo Arbenz Guzman’s leftist government that threatened the land holdings of the United Fruit Company—a US multinational with considerable power and interests in Central America. The brazen Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956 when Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal is another well-known case.

Often, when US interests were threatened, rather than go to war US leaders relied on the CIA to work with local disaffected elements in the military to engineer a change of government or kill the incumbent president. The cases are overwhelming—such as the murder of Congo’s Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, and the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953. All these countries had huge mineral resources.

The rationale used by the US and its Western allies for invading countries changed when the Cold War ended in the 1990s and the US emerged as the sole superpower. The concept of humanitarian intervention gained ground within the United Nations system. This involved the US and other Western powers working through the UN to end wars and rebuild war-battered societies.

During that period, the US felt it did not face any existential threat, like communism, and could act as a moral force or policeman of the world while hiding its real interests. That posture rhymed with the values of the unipolar world: the spread of democracy, human rights and economic or market liberalism.

The US, however, faced strong resistance from most countries when it tried to use humanitarianism to overthrow governments it did not like without evidence to support its claims. Matters came to a head in 2003 over Iraq, which the US invaded under the humanitarian pretext of disarming it of weapons of mass destruction. It turned out that there were no such weapons. The US was simply after Iraq’s oil and helping to dismember a formidable foe of Israel.

As the Global Geopolitics article demonstrates, US interventions under the pretext of humanitarianism have always been catastrophic for those who live in the affected countries. After the old regime has been dislodged, the US often leaves the shattered countries to sort out the mess while it retains control of the resources that are the hidden but real reason for the interventions.

Understanding the violence in Nigeria

Numerous reports and studies have shown that Nigeria’s violence affects Christians and Muslims. No group is insulated from it. I can think of six types of violence in the country. The first three are the Boko Haram, Islamist-inspired violence in the Northeast, whose main victims are Muslims who reject the group’s Islamist ideology; banditry in the Northwest, which affects Muslims and Christians in equal measure; and the ‘herder-farmer’ conflict in the Middle Belt, which affects Christians and Muslims, although reports indicate that Christians are the main victims of that violence.

The other three types of violence are the ‘herder-farmer’ violence in the Northwest, in which Fulani herders are reportedly pitched against Hausa farmers (both groups are Muslim); the violence inflicted by the Indigenous People of Biafra and bandits in the East against their own people, Igbos, who are Christian; and general banditry in large parts of the country, which has rendered traveling by road between cities risky.

The Nigerian state has been terribly negligent in its duty to protect the lives of Nigerians. And its poor record of economic management, corruption and poverty has driven many people to the edge. However, as can be seen from the above review, the state itself is not the key actor generating the violence. Non-state actors actively drive it.

If Christians and Muslims are equally affected by Nigeria’s multilayered violence, how did the narrative of Christian genocide emerge? A narrative of Christian genocide and Fulanisation has been developing among some groups in Nigeria who feel helpless as raw terror takes hold of their lives and communities, especially during the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, a Fulani, who was accused of being soft on Fulani herders when they committed wanton atrocities against other ethnic communities in the Middle Belt. That narrative feeds into Nigeria’s often toxic ethnic and religious discourse on domination and marginalisation. Lately, some of these groups have intensified their narrative to win support from powerful Western constituencies. These groups have mastered the techniques of misinformation through various social media outlets, networking and lobbying to insert their grievances into the politics of far-right movements in the US. Having a president like Trump who thrives on culture wars is seen as a boon.

White far-right groups in South Africa provided the road map. When, in February 2025, Trump accused the South African government of genocide against white farmers and condemned that country’s new land ownership law as racist, it was the post-apartheid discourse of white victimhood and lobbying activities of a right-wing Afrikaner pressure group, AfriForum, that got the Christian Right in the US, Republican policymakers and Trump to adopt the narrative of white genocide.

Some disaffected groups in Nigeria have copied from the playbook of AfriForum by drumming up the rhetoric of Christian genocide. Phillip van Niekerk reports in the Daily Maverick that diaspora “Biafran separatists” have “repackaged” their secessionist grievance as a struggle to save “persecuted Christians”’ and have been engaged in a lobbying campaign in Washington in partnership with Mercury Public Affairs, BW Global Group and Daniel Golden.

There is also a video circulating on WhatsApp, which shows a Catholic Bishop of Makurdi Diocese in Benue State in Nigeria, Wilfred Anagbe, addressing an audience in the US, in which he paints a dire picture of the fate of Nigerian Christians, alleging that Nigeria is being turned into an Islamic state and Christians are being wiped out. And in a letter signed by the president and vice president of the American Veterans of Igbo Descent to Trump, the organization declared that they “are ready and willing to assist in any efforts aimed at the liberation and protection of Christians in Nigeria.”

These campaigns have resonated with American Christian nationalists, whose politics is driven by the notion of Christian civilisation under siege and the imperative of defending it. Hard-right politicians in the Republican Party, such as Ted Cruz, conservative political commentator, Bill Maher, Black corporate democrats and corporate journalists, such as New York City Mayor Eric Adams and Van Jones, and many others in Trump’s MAGA base, have jumped on the bandwagon. Cruz introduced a bill in the US Senate in September 2025 that designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” and imposed sanctions on Nigerian officials who are perceived as facilitating ‘“Islamist jihadist violence” and blasphemy laws.

Does Trump have beef with Tinubu?

Why didn’t Trump try to discuss his alleged grievances with Tinubu instead of threatening him with war? Where a vassal relationship exists between a great power and a weak state, recourse to war is never the first option in making demands. The great power can use various methods, including coercion, to get the vassal state to do its bidding. This is what Trump has done in Ukraine and the DRC. He has been able to gain access to the mineral wealth of those two countries without declaring war on them.

Recent developments suggest that relations between Trump and Tinubu may not be that cordial. Trump has been unable to get Tinubu and his government to support several of his pet projects in the foreign policy field. We could start with the Niger-ECOWAS conflict, which Trump inherited from Biden. Just after taking office in 2023, Tinubu gave the impression in the eyes of many that he had signed up to the project of policing the West African region on behalf of Western interests. As Chair of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), he issued an ultimatum to the military leader of Niger, General Abdourahamane Tchiani, who had staged a coup, to hand power back to the deposed leader, Mohammed Bazoum or face military intervention. Some of the most draconian sanctions in Africa were imposed on Niger, including cutting off the electricity supply and trade relations, and blocking financial transactions between ECOWAS and Niger.

It seemed that Tinubu, who had just won a highly disputed election and seemed unaware of Nigeria’s core strategic interests, was being egged on by Alassane Ouattara of Côte D’Ivoire and Macky Sall of Senegal—both regarded as client leaders of the French president, Emmanuel Macron—to reverse the coup in Niger by military force. France, supported by the EU and the US, was not willing to lose control of Niger’s rich deposits of uranium and its military base. The US was also worried about its drone base in the south of Niger, which served as part of its counterterrorism activities.

However, Tinubu faced significant opposition from Nigerians, especially Northern clerics, civil society activists and the National Assembly. He huffed and puffed but failed to pull the trigger. His abrupt climb down bolstered the confidence of the military leaders of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali to withdraw from ECOWAS, which they described as a neocolonial instrument of Western powers; they formed an alternative organization—the Alliance of Sahel States.

The failure of ECOWAS under Tinubu to reverse Niger’s military coup may have convinced Trump that he could not be relied on to carry out the West’s agenda in West Africa, even though he continues to maintain cordial relations with Macron in France. The US may also have faced a rebuff from the Tinubu administration to relocate its Niger base to Nigeria when Niger’s military leader ordered the US to shut down its base in Niger. Civil society activists raised the alarm that there were active discussions between the US and the Tinubu administration to relocate the base to Nigeria. Growing opposition to the idea forced the US and Nigerian authorities to deny the allegations.

Two other areas of conflict are worth highlighting to underscore the strained relations between Trump and Tinubu. The first is Nigeria’s emphatic rejection of Trump’s request to accept Venezuelan deportees or third-party prisoners from the US. Adding insult to injury, Tinubu’s foreign minister, Yusuf Tuggar, evoked a famous remark from the US rap group Public Enemy in rejecting the request: “In the words of the famous US rap group Public Enemy … You’ll remember a line from Flav Flav—a member of the group—who said: ‘Flav Flav has problems of his own. I cannot do nothin’ for you man,’.” This must have rankled Trump, especially as other African countries, such as Ghana, Rwanda, Eswatini, South Sudan and Uganda, had agreed to accept his deportees.

It is important to note that Trump has a dystopian view of Africa, which he described during his first term in office as a continent of “shithole countries.” John McDermott, Chief Africa correspondent at The Economist, highlighted comments made by Trump about Africa on Air Force One, which reveal his “generally apocalyptic assumptions about Africa.” As McDermott reported, Trump said, “[In Africa] They have other countries, very bad also, you know that part of the world, very bad …” With these kinds of views, Trump would not expect an African leader to turn down his request for help. Such a leader should be taught a lesson, he would imagine.

Then there is Nigeria’s decision to stick to its longstanding policy of supporting a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Tinubu’s foreign minister, Tuggar, has also been clear and forthright in condemning Israel’s genocidal carnage in Gaza. He described the violence as “something every human being should stand up and oppose.” Nigeria was part of 119 states that voted for immediate ceasefire in Gaza when the violence first erupted in 2023. It also voted, in 2024, against Israel’s occupation of Gaza.

So, what we have is a confluence of interests—local and foreign, and economic and ethnoreligious—as well as personal grievances and a warped view of Africa that have shaped Trump’s decision to threaten military action in Nigeria. However, no great power threatens war to save the souls of foreign people it despises or with whom it shares no strong bonds. History suggests that lurking behind every US intervention is the pursuit of economic and geopolitical interests.

I have tried to imagine what the US would do if it were to carry out its military threat. Would it bomb the Tinubu government out of existence, which would lead it to confront the real terror groups? Or would it ignore the Tinubu government and conduct a bombing campaign against the terrorists, who operate clandestinely in small groups? Either way, the US would be involved in a messy and costly guerrilla war that it will have no stomach to fight.

It is important to note that the US has never been successful in defeating terrorist groups in their own countries. It lacks the zeal, commitment and technique to sustain a long-drawn-out war. The US history of intervention to save humanity is littered with abject failures: Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia hold sobering lessons. However, the chaos of intervention may not prevent the US from trying to control Nigeria’s rich resources. Mining companies have a reputation of thriving in conflict zones by striking deals with local militias.

Tinubu has released a press statement in which he highlighted his government’s policy of engagement with Christian and Muslim leaders since 2023, to address security challenges that affect “citizens across faiths and regions.” He affirmed that Nigeria is not a religiously intolerant country and opposes “religious persecution.” He has followed this up with a twenty-four-page document on “Nigeria and Religious Persecution: Deconstructing a Linear Narrative,” prepared by the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs (2025), which challenges in substantial depth the narrative of a Christian genocide.

However, Tinubu’s conclusion in his press release that his ‘administration is committed to working with the United States government and the international community to deepen understanding and cooperation on protection of communities of all faiths’ has raised eyebrows.

Could this be what Trump really wants to achieve with his military threat? Get the Tinubu administration to open talks with the US, which will then try to introduce the issue of rare earths and other economic and strategic issues in the negotiations, and force a deal?