US President Donald Trump recently threatened to take military action against Nigeria to save Christians from a “genocide.” Trump has three possible motives for making such a threat: his mercantilist quest for rare-earth minerals, his pandering to evangelical Christians, and his racist grievances.
PRETORIA – On the eve of America’s imperial invasion of the Philippines in 1899, the British poet and defender of empire Rudyard Kipling urged the United States to: Over the next decade, Kipling’s injunction became the leitmotif of the West’s “civilizing” mission, justifying the imperial scramble to annex African and Asian territories. Under the cover of stopping wars by truculent savages and saving lost souls, Western powers exploited the resources of their colonies. As the late political scientist Samuel Huntington observed, it was not the strength of the West’s ideas, but rather the brutality of its actions that enabled these imperial conquests.
Still, in addition to the gun, European colonization of Africa relied on the Bible: colonizers would turn pagan infidels into righteous Christians. US President Donald Trump seems to be following a similar playbook, threatening military intervention in Nigeria – an oil- and mineral-rich country of 230 million people – to save the country’s Christian population from a “genocide.” Echoing old justifications for imperial land grabs, Trump recently posted on social media that the US may “go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists.”
But while Nigeria’s complex conflicts have indeed resulted in more than 100,000 deaths since 2011, with around 8,000 people killed in 2025 alone, Trump has shown no concern for saving lives in Nigeria – one of the “shithole countries” he denigrated in his first term. After all, his administration dismantled the US Agency for International Development, which provided life-saving humanitarian assistance to 270,000 Nigerians and funded about 21% of Nigeria’s national health budget.
Given this context, Trump has three possible motives for threatening to invade the country. The first is his mercantilist quest for rare-earth minerals, approximately 30% of which are located in Africa. His crude pitch to the five African presidents who visited the White House in July was focused on minerals, as was his vanity peacemaking efforts between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda.
This is not the first time that Trump has set his sights on another country’s natural resources. Starting in 2011, Trump proposed stealing Iraq’s oil to “reimburse” the US for its interventions in the Middle East. More recently, his reckless military moves against oil-rich Venezuela, including the seizure of a Venezuelan oil tanker in international waters, represent a form of piracy.
Nigeria appears ripe for plundering. Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu – a politician steeped in what political scientist Richard Joseph termed prebendalism (the use of public office to generate material resources for office-holders and their clients and cronies) – and previous Nigerian administrations have waged an inept counter-insurgency. Their gross incompetence and malfeasance, combined with the greed of a kleptocratic elite callously indifferent to the plight of their fellow citizens, has cast doubt on the future of Nigeria’s democracy.
Profligate politicians’ raids on the state’s coffers have left Nigeria’s military (once widely respected for its peacekeeping efforts in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s) and police in a parlous state – a major obstacle to tackling security challenges. Nuhu Ribadu, Nigeria’s national security adviser, has accused soldiers and police of selling and loaning their weapons to “bad people,” while some government officials are suspected of colluding with terrorists. US sanctioning of such individuals would be immensely popular in Nigeria.
In such a volatile political atmosphere, attackers often go unpunished, and officials are rarely held accountable for failing to protect local populations. As a result, jihadist groups like Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province have operated with impunity in northeast Nigeria for years. But what Trump and many others overlook is that these terrorists kill far more Muslims than Christians.
In Nigeria’s fertile Middle Belt, an equally explosive conflict has erupted between Muslim herders from the Fulani ethnic group – backed by powerful political and business interests – and mainly Christian farmers, resulting in some 12,000 deaths since 2010. But these disputes are about land, grazing rights, and water more than religion.
Meanwhile, the kidnappings in Nigeria’s northwest, which have spread to other parts of the country, are motivated largely by banditry. Despite Tinubu’s claims to have eliminated more than 13,500 terrorists since taking office in May 2023, the death toll continues to mount: Amnesty International estimates that at least 10,217 terror-related fatalities occurred over the same period.
Another possibility is that Trump is catering to white evangelical Christians, who continue to be among his strongest supporters. Christian nationalist and right-wing US think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Gatestone Institute have fueled false narratives of “Christian genocide” in Nigeria, a framing that was recently reinforced by US Senator Ted Cruz. By threatening a humanitarian intervention in Nigeria, Trump can position himself as a staunch defender of Christianity.
The third explanation is that Trump is promoting racist stereotypes – he is playing the “white savior” trope – to shore up his MAGA (Make America Great Again) base. Trump has long said the quiet part out loud, emboldening white Americans to act on their most racist impulses. This year alone, he has falsely accused South Africa’s Black-led government of committing a “genocide” against white farmers, some of whom he invited to the US as refugees, and expressed his disgust for Somali immigrants, dismissing them as “garbage” he does not want in the US. His new National Security Strategy openly called on Europe to halt immigration to ensure that it remains “European.”
Any one of these reasons, or some combination of them, suggests that Trump’s threats to invade Nigeria reflect an imperial mindset. While some Nigerians are grateful to this delusional wannabe emperor for highlighting their government’s security failings, for Trump and his MAGA base (and ethnonationalist allies in Europe), Nigeria is just part of a civilizing mission focused on reviving an era of white Christian supremacy.
