Will Trump order US military operations in Nigeria?

It’s a matter that first drew global notice in 2014, when Boko Haram, operating largely in Nigeria’s northern frontier, along its borders with Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, kidnapped 276 girls from a school in the village of Chibok. Former first lady Michelle Obama posted a grim-faced image of herself on social media, posing with a white sheet of paper that said “#BringBackOurGirls.”

Trump’s threats to take military action against Islamist terrorists in far corners and remote regions of Nigeria are a new departure from his 2024 campaign trail rhetoric about avoiding foreign entanglements. In his successful bid for a second term, Trump largely campaigned as an isolationist, or at least noninterventionist.

Yet he has not governed that way in his 10 months-plus back in office. Trump has ramped up action against Venezuela, ordering airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and amassing military assets off the country’s coast for a possible attack on the mainland. And with Operation Midnight Hammer, he joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program.

These actions suggest Nigerian leaders, in the capital of Abuja, have reason to take Trump seriously about his threats of military use in Africa’s most populous country.

“People have the sense that if he really wants something, he’s going to get it,” said Ebenezer Obadare, Douglas Dillon senior fellow for Africa studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, about the possibility of U.S. military action in his home country.

“They know what he did in Iran,” Obadare, who is based in Washington, D.C., said in an interview. “There is now a feeling in Abuja, ‘This man can come after us.'”

Trump’s threats

Nigeria is a diverse, multiethnic country of more than 230 million people who are roughly divided between Muslims and Christians. (Some polls show an almost even split; others put it at closer to a narrow Muslim edge, between 51% to 55% of the population, depending on the survey.)

While Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, with a population of more than 17 million people, is a center of international trade, a more troubling situation exists in the nation’s outlying areas. Boko Haram and other terrorist groups largely compete for influence in the northernmost states. Bandits increasingly wreak havoc in the northwest. Farmer-herder conflicts affect the central states.

Also, Christians clustered in Nigeria’s middle belt area have come under the threat of violence not only from terrorist groups, but also from Muslim herders, who move during the crop cycles.

“In Nigeria’s Middle Belt, where many of these agrarian Christian communities live, the government has done very little in protecting them from militant herdsmen whom survivors report possess weapons as sophisticated as the Nigerian military,” said MacHarry Confidence, a security analyst at SB Morgen Intelligence, a firm based in Lagos.

Open Doors International, which tracks religious persecution, said more Christians are killed for their faith in Nigeria than anywhere else in the world. And Intersociety, an African nongovernmental organization, said in a recent report that jihadists have slaughtered more than 7,000 Nigerian Christians since December 2024. During a single massacre in June, Islamist militants set fire to buildings where Nigerian Christians slept and attacked those escaping with machetes, murdering as many as 200 people.

And on Nov. 17, 25 students were abducted from a girls secondary school by a group of armed assailants during the overnight hours in the country’s northwestern Kebbi state. The school’s vice principal was killed in the attack, officials said.

The mounting number of Christian victims of terrorism has drawn Trump’s ire. In a Nov. 1 Truth Social post, he singled out the plight of Christians allegedly being targeted by violence in Nigeria and raised the threat of direct military action.

“I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action,” Trump wrote. “If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians!”

Whether the violence is directed at Christians is a matter of some debate, since Muslims are also routinely victims of Boko Haram and splinter terrorist cells.

“All of them have specific doctrinal differences. But they’re all united in being anti-modern. They want the state as we know it now to be abolished. They want it replaced with a theocracy,” Obadare said. “They go against everybody who is against them. Everybody means those who are Christian, Muslim. Whether in a church or a hospital.”

In response to Trump’s threats of military force, the Nigerian government said it would “welcome U.S. assistance” in combating Islamic insurgents — if Washington respected its “territorial integrity.”

In a follow-up statement on social media, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu seemed to take more umbrage at Trump’s assertions that his country isn’t protecting its Christian population.

“The characterization of Nigeria as religiously intolerant does not reflect our national reality,” Tinubu said, adding that the Nigerian government “continues to address security challenges which affect citizens across faiths and regions.”

Endemic corruption slows anti-terrorism efforts

The terrorist violence continues to escalate due to an inability, or perhaps unwillingness, of Nigerian authorities to confront the outlaw groups head-on and aggressively. This is due in part to systemic corruption, with anti-terrorist funds routinely diverted to the bank accounts of elected officials, who, among other indulgences, use the misbegotten funds to build luxury homes along Nigeria’s Atlantic coast.

It’s part of a deep corruption in the nation’s political and financial spheres, to the point that it’s unsafe to use a credit card. This forces those who have money to carry around large wads of cash, which, of course, compounds already serious crime problems.

Investigative journalists have made valiant efforts to track where these public expenditures go. But their tools are limited due to poor record-keeping in the nation’s Parliament and other government institutions.

“Even when the military is sincere, it can’t seem to get the job done. It’s been politicized and not very effective,” Obadare said. “Due to corruption, going after Boko Haram has become an industry. Part of why the money has not translated is that it continues to disappear into private pockets.”

Much of the violence that has so hurt Christians gets carried out by the nomadic Fulani people. And Nigeria has “totally lacked any indication of political will” to go after Fulani militias, which are backed by the country’s powerful cattle breeders, Confidence said.

“One could make the argument that the country’s troubling security situation affects all faiths, but on closer scrutiny, there are actors whose existence is geared towards attacking Christians and other non-Muslims,” Confidence said in an email interview.

The regional terrorist groups continue to mutate and expand. Among them is JNIM, a Salafi-jihadist organization based in western Africa that aligns with al Qaeda. The group was formed in 2017 when four Mali-based extremist groups, Ansar al Din, al Murabitun, the Macina Liberation Front, and the Sahara, merged into one, according to the director of national intelligence’s counterterrorism guide.

For whatever reason, the Nigerian military hasn’t risen to the occasion of effectively fighting these Islamist groups in and around rural areas.

“A series of massacres on these Christian farming communities in Benue, Plateau, Southern Kaduna, etc., have been met with military inaction despite being stationed in the areas where the attacks take place,” Confidence said. “I was in Yelwata a few days after the massacre of June 2025 and was told that the military never helps. And the country’s civilian intelligence agency, the DSS, leaked a memo after that confirming that there was credible intelligence passed on to the military at least a month before, detailing the communities that would be attacked. Yet the military failed to preempt the killings.”

Likelihood of US military action in Nigeria

During his 2024 campaign, Trump emphasized a foreign policy of “America First,” pledging to end wars and focus on domestic interests. His proposed policies included using high tariffs on imports, prioritizing bilateral deals over multilateral agreements, and questioning military alliances such as NATO.

So, it is an open question whether Trump will follow through on his threats to deploy U.S. military might in Nigeria.

“Will he actually send in troops? This is President Trump, so who knows?” Obadare said.

Nigeria, though, is currently suffering from self-inflicted political wounds amid Trump’s strong rhetoric about anti-Christian violence in Nigeria. Since the country does not currently have an ambassador to the United States, it is less able to sell its case in Washington.

The Trump administration’s goal may be to force Nigeria to get its act together and combat the terrorist groups more aggressively.

“Nigeria does not lack military assistance to do the job,” Confidence said. “It has the most equipped military in this part of the world. The problem is political will, in addition to accountability. There is no political will to end the security crisis.”

NIGERIA DISMISSES TRUMP’S MILITARY THREAT, SAYS HE MERELY WANTS A ‘SIT-DOWN’

The Trump administration may stand down if Nigeria can show it is taking the problem of anti-Christian violence seriously and getting its act together on stemming government corruption, Confidence said.

“Security in Nigeria is a blackhole where money goes to disappear,” he said. “If the U.S. can demand greater accountability from Nigeria in terms of its operations, we may see different results.”