A little-noticed administration effort has noble intentions and seriousness of purpose but needs to be handled with great care
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Donald Trump’s November 2025 threat to go into Nigeria “guns-a-blazing” if the country’s authorities failed to take action to stop “the killing of Christians” by violent extremists was roundly condemned by critics. They accused the president of being facile about a complex security situation and pandering to advocates with a hidden agenda.
Since then, and much to the surprise of those who were convinced that the Trump White House would quickly move on to other things, the administration has stayed the course in Nigeria. Apart from ordering air strikes against suspected terrorist targets in the northwestern region of the country on Christmas Day 2025, the United States in February dispatched 200 troops to the West African country to “help with training, technical support and intelligence-sharing.” The Nigerian Defense Headquarters (DHQ) has since confirmed this purely advisory role of the U.S. military.
The administration deserves credit for following through on its vow—as expressed in the National Security Strategy—to tackle “resurgent Islamist terrorist activity in parts of Africa.” Nonetheless, an ill-considered involvement in a protracted insurgency could put American military personnel in an untenable situation, making nonsense of the administration’s understandable wish to avoid “any long-term American presence or commitments” in the region.
This is not the first time that Washington has supported Nigeria’s counterterrorism efforts. After Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped 276 schoolgirls from the village of Chibok in the northeastern state of Borno in April 2014, the White House gave the Nigerian government military and technical assistance, including manned surveillance flights, to locate the whereabouts of the abducted children. Then, U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama played a prominent role in the ensuing #BringBackOurGirls media campaign to keep the issue on the front burner. American assistance in counterterrorism efforts in Nigeria has also included tagging Boko Haram’s top commanders as Specially Designated Global Terrorists; designating Boko Haram and its splinter factions as Foreign Terrorist Organizations; working with the Nigerian authorities to improve security-sector institution capacity; and finally, providing support to populations affected by Boko Haram operations.
President Trump’s interest in the plight of Nigerian Christians dates back to his first term, when he designated Nigeria a Country of Particular Concern—a status reserved for entities believed to be involved in “systematic, ongoing, and egregious religious freedom violations.” He did so in December 2020, after putting it on a Special Watch List the previous year. (Joe Biden’s secretary of state, Antony Blinken, reversed the decision and removed Nigeria from the list in November 2021.) Before then, in 2017, the Trump administration had green-lighted the sale of A-29 Super Tucano military planes to Nigeria after the Obama administration, citing concerns about possible human rights abuses by the government, had withdrawn its approval. In February, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control froze the assets and properties of Nigerian individuals and organizations accused of links to Boko Haram and the Islamic State.
Against this backdrop of decades-long material and technical support, the recent troop deployment is not so much a shift in strategy as it is a powerful signal to the Nigerian government that the administration is determined to back up its threat to intervene militarily. The move also indicates that the Trump White House may have realized that air strikes alone cannot dislodge the militants, who have a deep knowledge of the terrain and whose modus operandi is to launch sudden attacks on remote communities and villages followed by a quick retreat into surrounding forests.
Insofar as troop deployment indicates the administration’s faith in military action, it raises the question as to its effectiveness in tackling the insurgency steadily festering in Nigeria and the broader Sahel region.
Whether American counterterrorism efforts in Nigeria succeed or fail will depend to some extent on the reception accorded U.S. personnel—something that, for its part, will ultimately boil down to public perception of the mission. In that regard, the fact that the latest moves appear to have been coordinated and executed with the imprimatur of the Nigerian authorities bodes well. Although President Trump was the first to announce the Christmas Day air strikes, which he did on his social media account, subsequent confirmation from the Nigerian External Affairs Ministry that the bombings were a “joint operation” and “part of ongoing, structured security cooperation with the U.S. to eliminate terror threats” quickly allayed fears of American unilateral action. Furthermore, following criticism of the Christmas Day military action as having achieved little due to its being based on outdated intelligence, Nigerian Defense Minister Christopher Gwabin Musa clarified that the action had helped drive the Lakurawa terrorist faction (an offshoot of the Islamic State) back across the country’s northwestern border with Niger.
In another good omen, U.S. intervention has also been welcomed by other segments of the Nigerian society, including major media outlets, which have embraced it as “a fitting but long overdue diplomatic signal to all terrorism merchants, sponsors, and foot soldiers in Nigeria that their days are numbered.”
Yet others have expressed reservations that the U.S. would overlook at its own peril.
Unsurprisingly, the religious element looms large. In several social media posts, President Trump has conveyed the impression that the American campaign in the northern region of Nigeria is motivated by a desire to rescue its Christian citizens, who his administration believes are “facing an existential threat” due to persistent attacks by Islamist insurgents. At the same time, various pro-Christian advocacy groups have played a prominent role in creating awareness about the plight of Christian victims of Boko Haram, especially in the central region of the country.
Now, while it is correct to say that Nigerian Christians have been specifically targeted (even though the victims of Boko Haram and other insurgent groups do cut across the religious spectrum), the idea that the United States may be seen to be crusading on behalf of Nigerian Christians is bound to ruffle the social balance in the predominantly Muslim northern segment of the country. Key northern Islamic leaders and clerics have already accused the United States of harboring a “hidden agenda,” while others have demanded that the Nigerian authorities “halt all military cooperation with the United States immediately because of its imperial tendencies.” The longer the United States military personnel remain on the ground in the region, the likelier that these voices will get louder.
A section of the Nigerian commentariat has also questioned whether American help for the Nigerian military is a ruse intended to mask Washington’s ostensible desperation to seize the country’s oil installations—pointing, first, to recent U.S. military exploits in oil-rich Venezuela and, second, to America’s relentless pursuit of critical minerals. While the accusation may sound far-fetched (there is no evidence of American troop deployment in the southern oil region of the country, and it seems unlikely that the Nigerian government would sanction such a move), the U.S. should take account of the negative response as an indication of long-held popular suspicions about American geopolitical calculations and intent in Africa.
While the U.S. can take some satisfaction from the recognition that it is in Nigeria at the pleasure of the Nigerian authorities, prudence lies in recognizing the fissures highlighted and, accordingly, the fact that on-the-ground reality can change very quickly.
No less important is the question of how the U.S. defines the battlefield opposition in Nigeria. A substantial sociological literature continues to frame the Islamist insurgency (in Nigeria and beyond) as a product of a crisis of governance whose cure is to be sought in appropriate political remedies. This view neglects Islamism’s all-important theocratic underpinning and the fact that political intervention is redundant unless the immediate military threat is nullified first.
While direct American assistance to Nigeria rightly recognizes the need to engage militarily with various terror groups responsible for as many as 300,000 fatalities and more than 2.3 million people displaced since the outbreak of attacks in 2009, part of the reason that these groups have kept going is rooted in their earnest ideological convictions—something that, paradoxically, American involvement in Nigeria may well end up stoking.
Apart from accepting and treating the insurgency as the ideological phenomenon that it is, Washington’s actions in Nigeria must be seen as part of a campaign to combat and defeat violent extremism across the Sahel more broadly. As recent events in Mali have underscored, the Pentagon is in the wrong place if it supposes that this is a conflict it can enter into while hoping to avoid “any long-term presence or commitments.”
Dealing with the Nigerian military, highly unprofessional and notorious for its corruption, will pose its own problems as well. Collaboration with it will be a test of patience for U.S. personnel. In the past, the Nigerian military has faced accusations of giving outdated or false intelligence to the United States. More worrying, Nigerian soldiers have been previously accused of leaking intelligence about planned operations to extremists. All this means that the U.S. finds itself in an alliance with a partner whose interest and sincerity it must continually second-guess.
Finally, given what we know about how endemic instability both fuels and feeds off extremism, it goes without saying that military engagement without commensurate investment in helping Nigeria shore up its nascent democratic institutions will ultimately amount to a waste of effort and resources. In light of this, the administration’s decision to abstain from commenting on the “fairness or integrity” of most elections is very unfortunate. Democracy is not the antithesis of what President Trump seeks to accomplish in Nigeria and Africa. It is its inalienable postulate.
*Professor Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).This article was originally published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy: https://www.commentary.org/articles/ebenezer-obadare/trump-counterterrorism-nigeria/
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