Recently, President Donald Trump made an announcement about possible military intervention in Nigeria to protect the country’s Christian population from persecution. In reality, the massacres are carried out by extremist groups like Boko Haram, not the Nigerian government. Furthermore, even in those attacks, Christians are not the only ones targeted: Anybody who stands in the way of an Islamic caliphate, including Muslims, are in their crosshairs.
But that aside, what happened to “America First?” I guess maybe, for the sake of argument, we will just have to accept that under this new God-fearing administration, Christians are an exception to the rule for humanitarian interventionism. But wait. Then why isn’t Trump punishing Russia for massacring scores of civilians in Ukraine (many of whom are also Christian) and closing their churches in Russian-occupied territory? And why did Trump reignite relations with the new Islamist government in Syria, even though Syrian Christians are not only being persecuted under the regime but are also victims of attack by the regime’s security forces and aligned militants?
The reality of this situation is, the “Christian genocide” in Nigeria is not real. Intervening in Nigeria would by no means be strategic for the U.S., either. If anything, it would possibly push Nigeria into China’s orbit; yet we still threaten to invade them. But when there is an actual existing case where Russia, a strategic adversary, is persecuting Ukrainian Christians — or another real-world example where Syria, an Islamist state with ties to al-Qaeda, is complicit in the persecution of Syrian Christians — we try to normalize relations with them? And perhaps the most shameless example of this pseudo-humanitarian hypocrisy is that Trump was accused of considering ethnic cleansing himself, that being the expulsion of two million Palestinians from Gaza so the U.S. could turn it into a luxury resort.
Trump’s foreign policy is not pragmatic, it’s not humanitarian and it’s not values-based. It’s incoherent nonsense of an old man treating international relations like a toy to play with when he’s bored. This isn’t just a bad foreign policy; it’s a complete lack of one.
