Trump Finds His Next Democracy to Export: Nigeria
Former President Trump, according to Bloomberg, is once again flexing the prospect of US military intervention, this time eyeing Nigeria. His stated concern? The Nigerian government 'continues to allow the killing of Christians' by Islamic militants. It’s a convenient narrative that neatly sidesteps the complex internal conflicts, resource struggles, and historical regional instability that
actually plague nations like Nigeria—issues often exacerbated, not solved, by external military muscle. One might wonder why similar outrage is absent when it comes to, say, Saudi Arabia's treatment of religious minorities or their war in Yemen. This 'protecting Christians' mantra has a long, bloody lineage, frequently invoked to justify interventions that ultimately serve strategic or resource
interests. It ignores the US's own history of arming and sometimes destabilizing regions in Africa and the Middle East, leading to the exact kind of insurgencies it later promises to quash. From Libya to Iraq, interventions rarely leave robust democracies in their wake, but they always leave a market for weapons. What a coincidence.