Hello to all the independent thinkers out there, and welcome back.
We need to cut through the noise immediately. If you open your newspapers today or scroll through your feeds, you are being bombarded with a very specific, very seductive narrative. You are reading about American power on display. You are reading that President Trump has ordered a powerful and deadly strike against Islamic militants in Nigeria to protect Christians.
You are hearing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declare that the killing of innocents must end and that the Department of War is always ready.
The media paints this as a righteous thunderbolt, a demonstration of resolve, a reassertion of American strength. Let me be blunt: this is not strength. This is a strategic hallucination.
What we are witnessing in West Africa is not the reawakening of a superpower. It is the strategic convulsion of a hegemon that has lost its mind. We are watching the United States once again fall into the trap of liberal hegemony, or in this case, a strange hybrid of moralistic crusading where we believe we have the right, the duty, and the capacity to socially engineer outcomes in a region that is of zero strategic importance to the vital national interests of the United States.
Let’s look at the mechanism of what actually happened. Stripped of the emotional rhetoric, the United States Navy fired more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles from the Gulf of Guinea. These are premier, high-end assets. Each one of those missiles costs roughly $2 million.
And what did we hit? We hit two camps in Sokoto State in northwestern Nigeria. We hit insurgents who drive pickup trucks and hide in the bush.
Think about the cost-exchange ratio here. It is clinically insane. We are using multi-million-dollar munitions to destroy targets that are worth, at best, a few thousand in material assets.
But the financial cost is the least of our worries. The real cost is the strategic opportunity cost. I have been arguing for decades that the world is anarchic. There is no night watchman. States must prioritize their survival above all else.
And in the 21st century, the United States faces one and only one true existential threat. That threat is a rising China. China is a peer competitor. It has the population, the wealth, and the technological sophistication to dominate Asia and push the United States out of the Western Pacific. That is where the history of this century will be written.
Every hour that U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM, spends planning strikes in Nigeria, every Tomahawk missile we fire into the Sahel, and every ounce of political capital we spend coordinating with the Nigerian military is a resource that is not being focused on the Indo-Pacific. It is a distraction.
And in the ruthless world of great power politics, distraction is death.
Beijing is watching this. They are looking at us firing cruise missiles into the Nigerian scrubland to avenge sectarian violence, and they are laughing. They see a superpower that is easily baited, easily distracted, and incapable of ruthless prioritization.
Now, let’s dissect the justification. The president stated explicitly that this was to protect Christians from Islamic slaughter. While the sentiment may be humanely understandable, relying on it for foreign policy is a recipe for disaster.
This is the logic of the Crusades, not the logic of realpolitik.
When the United States explicitly frames a military intervention in Africa as a defense of one religious group against another, we are not putting out a fire. We are pouring gasoline on it. We are validating the very propaganda of groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda, who claim the West is at war with Islam, by stepping into this sectarian quagmire where the conflict is driven by deep-seated ethnic divisions, competition for land, and economic banditry in the Northwest.
We are Americanizing the conflict. We are turning a local insurgency into a global target. Those Tomahawk missiles did not solve the problem. They just ensured that the next bomb that goes off might be aimed at an American embassy or an American business.
We are manufacturing enemies in a region where we should have no enemies because we should have no presence.
Furthermore, consider the moral hazard we are creating with the Nigerian government. We are told this was done in coordination with the Nigerian military. The Nigerian government, of course, loves this.
Why?
Because it allows them to buck-pass. In the offense of realism, buck-passing is when a state tries to get another state to fight its battles for it.
Nigeria is the most populous nation in Africa. It has immense oil wealth. It should be the regional hegemon of West Africa. It should be capable of policing its own borders and dealing with internal bandits. But for over a decade, their military has struggled against Boko Haram and ISWAP. Corruption is endemic. Incompetence is rife.
When Uncle Sam steps in with cruise missiles to do the job for them, what incentive does the Nigerian military have to reform? None. What incentive do they have to fix their own broken command structures? Zero.
We are effectively telling them, “Do not worry about your failure to govern. The United States Navy will act as your air force.” We are fostering dependency. We are underwriting a dysfunctional state. And just like in Afghanistan, just like in Vietnam, we will eventually realize that no amount of American firepower can substitute for a functioning local government.
We are building a castle on a foundation of quicksand.
Let’s go deeper into the structural forces at play here. The violence in Nigeria is not just about terrorist scum, as the president put it. It is a complex web. In the northeast, you have the jihadists like ISWAP. But in the northwest, where these strikes happened, the violence is largely driven by bandits and gangs kidnapping for ransom. These are criminal enterprises mixed with communal violence.
Does Washington really believe that a dozen cruise missiles can solve the socioeconomic collapse of northern Nigeria?
This is the hubris of the American elite. They believe there is a military solution to every political problem. They believe that if we just kill enough bad guys, peace will break out. It is a childish delusion. We killed thousands of Taliban. We killed thousands of insurgents in Iraq. And what happened? The structure of the conflict remained. The underlying political realities did not change.
The moment we leave—and we always leave—the void returns.
And look at the timing. Defense Secretary Hegseth mentions this happened on Christmas. It is theatrical. It is designed for domestic consumption. But foreign policy should never be a performance art.
When you launch missiles to send a message or to satisfy a domestic political constituency that is angry about the persecution of Christians, you are decoupling action from strategic interest.
The hard truth, the tragic truth that no one in Washington wants to admit, is that the slaughter of Christians in Nigeria, while horrific, does not affect the balance of power in the international system. It does not threaten the territorial integrity of the United States. It does not threaten our prosperity. Therefore, purely from a survival standpoint, it is not our fight.
But we cannot help ourselves. We have this liberal impulse, even in a Republican administration, to be the savior. We see a monster and we want to slay it. But in the international arena, there are monsters everywhere. If we chase them all, we will exhaust ourselves.
We are currently overstretched in Europe, propping up Ukraine in a lost war. We are entangled in the Middle East, protecting Israel and fighting proxies in Syria. And now we are opening a new kinetic front in West Africa. This is imperial overstretch in real time.
Meanwhile, the Chinese are building islands. They are securing supply chains. They are not firing missiles into Nigeria.
They are building infrastructure there to extract resources. They are playing the long game of realpolitik while we are playing the short game of moralistic whack-a-mole.
We must understand the concept of limits. The United States is powerful, but it is not omnipotent. We cannot impose our will on every corner of the globe. The more we intervene in these peripheral theaters, the more we weaken our core. We are bleeding credibility. We are bleeding resources. And we are bleeding focus.
What will happen next? It is predictable. The strikes will be hailed as a success today, but next week or next month, the violence will return. The bandits will regroup. ISIS will recruit the survivors. The Nigerian government will ask for more help.
“We need drones,” they will say. “We need advisors.”
And slowly, imperceptibly, the mission will creep. We will get sucked in. Five years from now, we will be asking ourselves why American soldiers are dying in the Sahel.
We have seen this movie before. We saw it in Mogadishu. We saw it in the Niger ambush in 2017. We act shocked when it goes wrong. But the mechanism for failure is baked into the very decision to intervene.
If we were serious—truly serious—about American security, we would pack up AFRICOM’s kinetic ambitions and bring those resources home or send them to the Pacific. We would tell the Nigerian government, “This is your country. These are your borders. You fix it.”
That is what a ruthless, rational great power does. It passes the buck. It conserves its strength for the decisive battle.
But we are not acting like a rational great power. We are acting like a crusader state, drunk on its own righteousness, flailing blindly in the dark. And in the unforgiving structure of international politics, such behavior is not just a mistake. It is a tragedy waiting to happen.
The tragedy is not just that we will fail in Nigeria. The tragedy is that, in our obsession with the periphery, we are losing the center. We are losing the ability to distinguish between what feels good and what is necessary.
So as you listen to the cheers from the establishment about these air strikes, I want you to keep your eyes on the horizon. Do not look at the smoke rising from Sokoto. Look east. That is where the storm is gathering.
And we are woefully unprepared for it because we are too busy playing policemen in a neighborhood that we do not understand and cannot control.
Stay safe, stay skeptical, and never stop asking the hard questions about where your blood and treasure are actually going. The truth is usually uncomfortable, but it is the only thing that matters.
I will see you next
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