The performance requires a villain. Africa has been performing that role for free, and at some cost to itself for considerably longer than it should have.
Major Chip Hazard Goes to Washington: When Toy Soldiers Run the War Department by Lawson Akhigbe
Donald Trump’s return to the White House marked the triumph of image over expertise. Cabinet positions increasingly resembled casting decisions. Loyalty became more important than experience. Television skills became more valuable than administrative competence.
When Tactical Brilliance Meets Strategic Confusion: Washington’s Iran Problem by Lawson Akhigbe
But wars are not graded like Olympic gymnastics. There are no medals for technical execution if the end result leaves your opponent intact, emboldened, or—worse—adapted.
The Karma of the Beautiful Game: How Spain’s 2026 Victory Rewrote the Script for Trump and the Aggies
In many ways, Spain’s 2026 triumph stands as a glorious, inescapable metaphor for what happens when performative ego, systemic meddling, and brute gamesmanship run smack into the unyielding wall of competence and poise.
Crocodile Tears and Caliphate Dreams: The Selective Christianity of Washington’s Nigeria Policy By Lawson Akhigbe
Let it be said plainly: Christians are dying in Nigeria's Middle Belt and northeast, in numbers that shame a government which has spent a quarter-century treating internal security as a procurement racket rather than a constitutional duty. That much is not in serious dispute, whatever Abuja's spokesmen protest on television. But sincerity and self-interest are not mutually exclusive states, and it takes a special sort of credulity to receive Donald Trump's sudden solicitude for Black Christians in the Sahel as anything other than what it plainly is a foreign policy improvised from a domestic culture war, deployed by an administration whose relationship with racial minorities at home has rarely troubled itself with tenderness. One does not have to admire

