Stay Out of Nigeria

Trump is misrepresenting what is happening in Nigeria, but U.S. military intervention in Nigeria for any reason makes no sense.

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.

It is telling that Trump’s first instinct is usually to make threats of violence. He warned that the U.S. could go in “guns-a-blazing” to “completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists.” We can only guess why Trump decided to make these threats now, but it says a lot about how he thinks that he immediately opted for saber-rattling and insane maximalism. Military action is frequently the first thing that springs to his mind instead of being considered only as a last resort.

There will be a temptation to dismiss Trump’s threats to intervene in Nigeria and punish the Nigerian government as so much bluster, but the president has followed through on enough of his unhinged threats over the years that it would be foolish to ignore this. Many people assumed that he wouldn’t attack Iran, but he did. Many people discounted his talk of using the military against cartels as cheap campaign rhetoric, but he meant what he said. The president has launched absurd and illegal trade wars against friendly countries for the most preposterous reasons. Do we really think he wouldn’t launch pointless airstrikes in Nigeria?

It should go without saying that Trump has no authority to launch attacks inside Nigeria. Even if the Nigerian government permitted U.S. military operations in their country, the intervention would still be illegal according to our laws. It may seem quaint or irrelevant to bring up the law when dealing with a tyrant, but it is because of his tyranny that we must keep demanding that the law be respected. It is our acquiescence to illegal presidential wars that has brought us here, and it is time that we put a stop to them.