The next war might start on Truth Social
Trump’s posturing over Nigeria exposes the peril of a president ruled by impulse.
On Nov. 1, President Donald Trump used his Truth Social account to claim that “Islamic Terrorists” were carrying out a mass slaughter of “our CHERISHED Christians” in Nigeria and warned that the United States would “go into that now disgrace country ‘guns a-blazing’.” He said that he had ordered the Defense Department to “prepare for possible action” and was considering cutting “all aid and assistance” to Abuja. Nigerian president Bola Ahmed Tinubu rejected the depiction of Nigeria as religiously intolerant and said the country protects citizens of all faiths; Tinubu adviser Daniel Bwala added that Nigeria— Africa’s largest democracy—would welcome U.S. assistance only if it respects his country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
It is unclear what drove this threat. No credible media reports suggest the CIA or the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) had delivered to Trump an assessment indicating that Islamist groups had launched—or were preparing—a coordinated campaign to exterminate Nigeria’s Christian population. Such violence is not new to the country—or to Africa. Boko Haram and its splinter, the Islamic State West Africa Province, have brutalized communities in northern Nigeria and neighboring countries for years, killing tens of thousands—mostly Muslims, though Christians, too. Similar attacks by other terrorist groups have scarred most of the Sahel, from Niger and Chad to Mali and Burkina Faso.
Nigeria, particularly its northern region, is a landscape of chronic and tragic insecurity, but not a sudden genocide; for perspective, Africa’s most horrific episode of mass killing—the Rwandan genocide of 1994, when Hutu extremists murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu—remains the region’s defining benchmark for what the word “genocide” truly means. Sadly, As the conflict enters its third year, Sudan’s civil war—a campaign on the part of all warring factions of mass displacement, ethnically targeted killings, and obstruction of aid—might soon sit alongside Rwanda as a defining case for contemporary genocide.
Counterterrorism analysts at the CIA and later at NCTC have been reporting on this awful wave of extremist violence throughout the continent since the early 2000s; none of it has been hidden from our government’s senior leaders. But Trump’s sense of crisis still tracks whatever he last saw or was sold, not what U.S. intelligence concludes, such as his impulse-by-spectacle late last month about restarting U.S. nuclear testing after Putin’s delivery-system theatrics.
The media, however, reported that Trump’s sudden awakening and vigor for intervention were sparked by advocacy-driven claims of Christian persecution circulating through conservative and evangelical media outlets. These accounts, though grounded in real atrocities, portrayed them as evidence of a coordinated anti-Christian genocide demanding, to them, a U.S. retaliation. Organizations such as the American Center for Law and Justice and several prominent pastors close to Trump publicly pressed the administration to act, arguing that the president had a moral duty to defend those being “hunted for their faith in Jesus Christ.” Their lobbying reached sympathetic Republican leaders and conservative commentators, who amplified the narrative across right-leaning platforms.
This pattern—presidential outrage ignited by advocacy rather than intelligence—has become a defining feature of Trump’s decision-making. His statements on Venezuela followed the same script: a burst of tough talk, reportedly after advisers and donors framed Nicolás Maduro’s regime as a “narco-terrorist” threat spilling chaos into the United States. Trump has not sought to temper these calls and has repeatedly told reporters that military options are on the table.
Trump insists he is the “peace president”—the man who ends wars rather than starts them. Yet each threat shows how easily that self-image folds into performance. His warnings of intervention often serve less as policy than performance, a way to reflect the Churchillian scowl of his official portrait while shifting attention from whatever domestic storm is brewing.
And because he has already shown in the Caribbean that he will kill people on the strength of his own determination alone and move major forces to back it up, every new threat has to be treated as potentially real, even when it looks like it came straight from his “feed.”
The timing rarely feels accidental. His Nigeria threat came just as expected Republican electoral losses were certain to dominate the week’s news cycle. For a president whose political metabolism depends on commanding attention, talk of military action remains his most reliable fix. The irony is that he condemns the media for obsession while providing it the very provocation that ensures he stays its center.
Trump’s predilection to equate unpredictability with strength leaves allies guessing at his intentions and emboldens adversaries who read volatility as weakness. It also unnerves others, such as Nigeria, who wish the United States no harm but seek clarity so they can align their own security choices.
Trump’s disdain for structured analysis is habit: He dismisses apolitical expertise and relies instead on flattery or alarm from whichever faction last caught his attention. The result is a foreign policy that mirrors his business style—chaotic by design, costly in consequence, and dangerous when applied to force.
History is littered with moments when impulse pulled the United States toward costly conflicts. Lyndon Johnson escalated our role in Vietnam after a brief naval clash in the Gulf of Tonkin. Ronald Reagan’s deployment of military forces to Beirut in 1982 ended in tragedy when a suicide bombing killed 241 service members. Even Bill Clinton’s humanitarian impulse in Somalia, spurred by images of starvation, devolved into urban warfare that scarred U.S. policy for a generation. Each began with talk meant to signal resolve and ended in a fight Washington did not need.
Sooner or later, a bluff will be tested, and Trump will find himself in a conflict he neither intended nor can explain as being in the interest of the American people—voters who want, as Tuesday’s elections demonstrated, economic security and believe the country is on the “wrong track.”
Responsible restraint is not weakness; it is the discipline that prevents small fires from becoming conflagrations. Allies and partners are watching closely—not for the next strike but for evidence that this president can separate partisan incitement, cable commentary, and donor pressure from national interest.
If American foreign policy continues to be driven by impulse and spectacle, its friends will continue to hedge, its rivals will probe, and its citizens—who have asked for stability and prosperity, not another crusade—will again pay the price for a leader’s inability to distinguish between theater and strategy.
Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech. His Safehouse Briefing Substack looks at what’s ahead in global security, geopolitics, and national strategy.
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Everything he does shows that he never grew up past the second-grade bully stage. Don't expect it to ever change.
But meanwhile, those "cherished Christians" in Nigeria are not on his list to get first priority admission to the USA if they wish to emigrate. Funny, I wonder why...the WHITE South Africans are, but the BLACK Nigerians aren't...