The Christmas Day Strikes in Nigeria and a New Oil Contest for West Africa
Written by Dhruva Nagesh, BSc Politics, Philosophy and Economics.
On Christmas Day 2025, a US Navy ship situated in the Gulf of Guinea fired 16 Tomahawk cruise missiles towards Sokoto State, in north-west Nigeria. American Vice President J.D. Vance and senior National Security Council officials framed the operation as an emergency response to threats against Christian communities. Neither the intelligence basis nor the target list was made public. Nigeria's government was briefed forty-eight hours before the strikes.
Since late 2023, evangelical advocacy groups and Republican lawmakers had fed the Trump administration accounts of Christians being slaughtered across Nigeria's Middle Belt. ACLED (Armed Conflict Location & Event Data) records more than 12,000 killings in Nigeria in 2025, the majority in farmer-herder land disputes and banditry that cut across religious groups. While the incidents most cited in those advocacy reports occurred in the Plateau and Kaduna states, the Christmas Day missiles landed in Sokoto, several hundred miles to the west.
“Allegations [are] generated in-country by minority lobby groups, amplified by American evangelical networks and delivered to an administration receptive to narratives of Christian and white victimhood in Africa”.
This is not a new script. Earlier in 2025, Trump amplified claims of a ‘white genocide’ targeting Afrikaners in South Africa, allegations also traced to conservative advocacy networks in the United States. Ryan Cummings, an analyst at Signal Risk, identified a shared architecture: allegations generated in-country by minority lobby groups are amplified by American evangelical networks and delivered to an administration receptive to narratives of Christian and white victimhood in Africa.
In November 2025, Trump threatened to go ‘guns-a-blazing’ into Nigeria. Nigeria thus hired Washington lobbying firm DCI Group for $9 million, with a mandate to reshape the Trump administration’s perception of Nigeria’s record on protecting Christians. The Christmas Day missile strikes came eight days after that contract was signed. In January, the two governments inaugurated a joint counter-terrorism working group. By 13th February 2026, 200 US military advisers and intelligence analysts had landed in Maiduguri.
For Nigeria, the dilemma is immediate: accept an expanding security partnership that shores up capacity but narrows autonomy, or risk isolation in a region already reshaped by great-power competition. Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer and most populous country. It is the one state in the region that Washington cannot afford to see turn, especially towards Beijing.
The strikes were executed through the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM), whose mandate covers the entire African continent. Nigeria's military states that its forces retain full command authority and that American personnel will not assume a combat role. This echoes US Special Operations in the 2010s, where forces deployed to Chad, Niger, and Cameroon under equivalent advisory mandates; the missions expanded incrementally, often outside formal War Powers Resolution notification. These governments have since expelled American forces entirely.
The stakes in Nigeria are of a different order. Wagner Group successors now hold training and extraction concessions across Mali, Niger, and the Central African Republic, the same arc of states from which Western forces have been pushed. In contrast, Cheta Nwanze of SBM Intelligence, a Nigerian-based market/security consulting firm, described the counter-terrorism rationale as 'genuine but convenient. It provides cover for interventions that also serve resource security objectives.'
