The president’s bellicose threats of going to war with one of the United States’ most crucial allies on the African continent took his aides completely by surprise.
Donald Trump has warned he will invade Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” if the West African country’s government didn’t do more to protect Christian civilians from attacks by Islamic extremists. It has since emerged that last weekend’s threats of military intervention followed after he’d watched a Fox News segment on the topic.
The Washington Post now reports the president’s threats blindsided “even those who had been pushing the issue,” and sparked “immediate concern” among bewildered officials at United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), which oversees U.S. military interests in the region.
Ranking members of that division advised subordinates to remain focused on efforts to rescue an American missionary who’d been kidnapped earlier in October, the newspaper adds. A source said those efforts were “of greater value than anything that can be achieved” in Nigeria, given a lack of resources available to expand existing operations in the country.
The day before announcing his willingness to launch a military campaign against a key U.S. security and economic partner in the region, Trump had said he would categorize Nigeria as a “country of particular concern.”
The label, which also presently applied to China, Cuba and North Korea, ordinarily only applies to state actors deemed to have engaged in or otherwise tolerate “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.”
Nigeria has faced increasing backlash from right wing Christian nationalists who accuse the country’s government of standing idly by as Islamic extremist groups in the country’s “Middle Belt’ and north central states carry out mass attacks against the civilian population.
Trump also designated Nigeria a “country of particular concern” during his first term. That designation was eventually reversed by the Joe Biden administration, who determined Nigeria “did not meet” the necessary legal criteria.
The White House did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday that surprise among Pentagon officials and White House aides was matched by alarm among their Nigerian counterparts. The West African nation has since leveraged diplomatic channels to try and clarify the U.S. president’s intentions, and underscore that any foreign assistance must respect Nigeria’s foreign sovereignty.
President Bola Tinubu has also publicly hit back against Trump’s “characterization of Nigeria as religiously tolerant” as something that “does not reflect our national reality” in a country whose population is evenly divided between Christians and Muslims.
““Religious freedom and tolerance have been a core tenet of our collective identity and shall always remain so,” he said. “Nigeria opposes religious persecution and does not encourage it.”
