President Donald Trump declared Friday that “Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria,” and designated Nigeria “a country of particular concern.” Such attention to the plight of Christians in Nigeria is decades overdue.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s staff has been working for several months on a Horn of Africa strategy that grew out of a review of the State Department’s Somaliland policy. To shake loose ossified U.S. policy is as important in West Africa.
Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, is a regional behemoth. Rubio should use Trump’s renewed focus to launch a comprehensive review. For decades, Nigerian leaders have tested the country’s social fabric. During the 1967-70 Biafran genocide, the Nigerian military deliberately starved 2 million civilians, mostly Christians. Its perpetrators not only escaped accountability but remained empowered. Muhammadu Buhari, a Nigerian army officer who participated in the massacres, rose twice to the presidency.
Racist ideologies never delegitimized fester. Buhari nurtured Islamist extremism and tolerated violence perpetrated against Nigeria’s Christians. Often, Buhari and his successor, Bola Tinubu, demanded Western money to fight the Boko Haram menace, only to divert those funds to fan anti-Christian violence. Buhari unleashed Fulani militias to target Christians in the oil-rich and largely Christian southeast. The Biden administration dismissed the obvious, suggesting the slaughter of Christians was due to climate change migration. Global warming, however, does not charter buses to bring armed gangs into Nigeria’s Christian heartland — Islamist politicians do.
When Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Nigeria in 2021, he removed Nigeria from its religious freedom watch list, shocking the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, which had documented massacres in Christian villages and the abduction and execution of Christians. “The Nigerian government has routinely failed to investigate these attacks and prosecute those responsible,” the commission’s 2021 report found.
The atrocities soon accelerated as Buhari interpreted the end of Nigeria’s designation as a green light to ramp up persecution of Christians. The resumption of Biafran separatism is a direct result.
There are other reasons to reconsider Nigeria policy. While a U.S.-led naval coalition extinguished piracy off the Horn of Africa a decade ago, pirates made the Gulf of Guinea their new epicenter. Nigeria suppresses its numbers by reclassifying some attacks as occurring within its 12-mile territorial waters to label them falsely as “armed robbery at sea” rather than piracy, a distinction that obscures the severity of the problem.
Rubio’s State Department has tweaked visa reciprocity to show unease at Nigeria’s behavior, but that is like fighting a forest fire with a water pistol. Just as Rubio oversees a Horn of Africa review, he should now direct a Gulf of Guinea review asking the questions his predecessors have swept under the rug: Is there a Christian genocide? Just as Somaliland’s independence has become a U.S. national interest, would Biafran independence also augment regional security? Should the United States commit to Nigerian unity, or is Nigeria simply a colonial vestige whose size and diversity condemn it to failure?
LOOMING SNAP DEADLINE AMPS UP SHUTDOWN PRESSURE ON BOTH TRUMP AND DEMOCRATS
Being secretary of state is the job of a lifetime. Too many of Rubio’s predecessors prioritized its perks. Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails show her more concerned with beating her predecessors’ mileage-flown and countries-visited records rather than helping besieged Christians or counter Islamist, Chinese, or Russian encroachment. John Kerry used tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to take his office staff on a tour of Antarctica, a territory over which the National Science Foundation, not the State Department, directs policy. Blinken treated Christians with disdain.
Rubio can do better. Precedent does not lead to policy perfection — it often represents a doubling down on failure. Neither U.S. security nor Christians in Nigeria can any longer afford such laziness. It is time to order a top-to-bottom Nigeria and Gulf of Guinea review. Christians inside Nigeria and beyond will depend on the outcome.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
