There is something deeply revealing about the way Nigeria suddenly became fashionable in the American culture wars.
For years, Nigeria’s insecurity has killed Christians, Muslims and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing between a gunman and his next ransom payment. Boko Haram kills Muslims. IS-affiliated groups kill Muslims. Bandits kill Muslims. Bandits kill Christians. Farmers and herders kill and are killed. Villages are attacked without asking victims to produce baptismal certificates before bullets are distributed.
Yet suddenly, Nigeria was discovered by the American Christian right.
Bill Maher entered the debate with his usual theatrical certainty, arguing that the killing of Christians in Nigeria was being ignored while Gaza dominated international attention. Senator Ted Cruz had already made Nigerian Christians a major political cause, introducing legislation and demanding American action.
The argument, stripped of its expensive television packaging, was essentially this: why is the world talking so much about Muslims dying in Gaza when Christians are also being killed in Nigeria?
It was a convenient question.
It also fitted perfectly into a political moment in which Israel was facing growing international criticism over the devastation and mass civilian suffering in Gaza. If the world’s moral spotlight could be redirected elsewhere, particularly towards violence committed by Muslims against Christians, then the conversation became rather more comfortable for those determined to defend Israel’s conduct.
And then Donald Trump arrived, as he usually does, with the diplomatic equivalent of a sledgehammer.
Nigeria Gets a Christmas Present
Trump repeatedly framed Nigeria’s insecurity as the targeted slaughter of Christians and threatened military action. On Christmas Day 2025, the United States launched strikes in Sokoto State, saying it was targeting Islamic State-linked militants. The US and Nigerian governments described the operation as coordinated, while US Africa Command said that multiple militants had been killed.
The symbolism could hardly have been more theatrical.
Christmas Day.
American missiles.
Northern Nigeria.
A president declaring that the action was a response to the killing of Christians.
The problem was that the facts stubbornly refused to cooperate with the script.
Sokoto is overwhelmingly Muslim. The places struck were not known as the epicentre of the alleged mass slaughter of Christians that had so exercised American politicians and television personalities. Residents of Jabo reportedly expressed astonishment at the attack, and questions quickly emerged about both the intelligence behind the strikes and the strategic purpose of bombing that particular area.
So what exactly was achieved?
America launched more than a dozen guided munitions. There was noise. There was dust. There was panic. There was impressive footage for television.
But the public evidence of a decisive military success was remarkably thin. US Africa Command said that “multiple” militants were killed, but precise identities and numbers were not publicly established.
Nigeria, meanwhile, was left with the curious spectacle of having to explain why another country had fired missiles into its territory.
The Nigerian government insisted that there had been cooperation and intelligence sharing with Washington.
Whether that reassurance reduced the embarrassment is another question entirely.
The Christians Who Became a Political Prop
The most interesting part of this entire episode is what happened afterwards.
The American political and media establishment that had suddenly discovered Nigerian Christians appeared to lose much of its enthusiasm once the missiles had been fired.
Where were the continuing demands for accountability?
Where was the sustained investigation into whether the security situation of Nigerian Christians had actually improved?
Where were the nightly television discussions asking whether the bombing had reduced the number of Christians killed?
The uncomfortable answer is that there was little sustained evidence that the underlying crisis had been solved. Nigeria’s security problems remained what they had always been: complex, regional, criminal, ideological, ethnic and religious, with both Muslims and Christians among the victims. Independent analysis also challenged the simplistic claim that Nigeria was experiencing a straightforward, one-directional “Christian genocide.”
That is the danger of turning suffering into a political slogan.
Once the slogan has performed its function, the people whose suffering supplied the slogan can be quietly returned to obscurity.
The missiles have been launched.
The television segment has been completed.
The president has looked decisive.
And the victims are left exactly where they were.
The Extraordinary Double Standard
Trump’s approach also exposed an extraordinary contradiction in American foreign policy.
He was prepared to threaten Nigeria with military action, presenting himself as the protector of Christians facing violence.
Yet the same moral urgency was conspicuously absent when it came to Israel and Gaza.
There, American power has operated according to an entirely different moral arithmetic. One set of civilian deaths demands fury, threats and missiles. Another produces diplomatic manoeuvres, military support and calls for patience.
Apparently, the value of human suffering depends heavily on who is doing the suffering, who is doing the killing and which lobby is listening.
That is not a foreign policy.
It is a geopolitical mood swing with cruise missiles.
From Nigeria to Venezuela to Iran
The Sokoto operation must also be understood within the wider pattern of Trump’s increasingly aggressive use of American power.
Washington’s successful intervention in Venezuela created its own sense of momentum, but success in one theatre can produce dangerous illusions elsewhere. The temptation is to believe that military force is a universal key capable of opening every political door. Recent developments in Iran, however, demonstrate how quickly a supposedly limited military action can become prolonged, costly and strategically complicated.
Military power can destroy.
It can intimidate.
It can produce spectacular footage.
What it cannot reliably do is solve political problems merely because the person ordering the strike believes he is a very big man.
America is now discovering that the world does not always obey the script written in Washington.
Nigeria was an easy target for a dramatic gesture. Venezuela offered a moment of apparent triumph. Iran has proved far more complicated, with a conflict that has become prolonged and economically costly despite earlier expectations of a short campaign.
History has a habit of turning military confidence into strategic debt.
The Real Lesson
The Christmas bombing of Sokoto was unworthy of a country that still claims to lead the democratic world.
It treated Nigeria’s complicated security crisis as a prop in America’s domestic religious and political arguments. It reduced the suffering of Nigerian Christians to a useful headline. It applied military force without demonstrating publicly that the underlying problem had been solved.
And, perhaps most importantly, it exposed the hypocrisy at the heart of selective humanitarian outrage.
If killing Christians requires cruise missiles, what does killing Muslims require?
If Nigeria must be threatened for failing to protect one religious community, why are America’s standards so elastic when its allies are accused of inflicting catastrophic suffering elsewhere?
The answers are uncomfortable because they expose a foreign policy in which principles often arrive after interests, carrying the luggage.
Nigeria did not need a Christmas fireworks display over Sokoto.
It needed serious intelligence cooperation, sustained assistance, accountable security institutions and a strategy capable of dealing with terrorism, banditry and organised criminal violence in all its forms.
Instead, it got missiles, headlines and presidential theatre.
And somewhere in Washington, perhaps, somebody declared the operation a great success.
Nigeria, as usual, was left to sweep up the dust.
