Faith Watch

Let me be blunt: since the Wehrmacht’s surrender in Tunisia in 1943, the African continent has offered the United States almost nothing of major consequence to its national interest. Our engagement since has been a costly, sentimental fog of humanitarian gestures and posturing, achieving little while ignoring the realities of power.

Washington’s central failure is its refusal to see the continent as it is. There are two successful models for order that have worked over large portions of Africa. The first is the default of Muslim rule. This system, even at its most functional, offers a brutal and usually racist order that threatens to return to its foundations of slavery and massacre. It offers only occasional and temporary alignments with Western interests and is utterly incompatible with Western values.

The second real-world alternative is colonialism. This, at least, offers a framework for the values the United States claims to export—property rights, the rule of law, and functional infrastructure. However, America lacks both the will and the capability for such a project. Witness the blood-soaked two-century history of Liberia, nominally sovereign but in reality the United States’ only African colony. As John Stuart Mill, formerly a clerk of the East India Company, once wrote, the British Empire was “a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes.” The US has never had an upper class big enough even to staff its embassies, much less to spare to rule great swathes of Africa with breeding, ability, and frigid hauteur.

ABUJA: Nigerians across the religious spectrum pushed back Monday (Nov 3) on US President Donald Trump’s threats of military intervention over the killing of Christians in the country.

Africa’s most populous country, which is roughly evenly split between a mostly Christian south and Muslim-majority north, is home to myriad conflicts, which experts say kill both Christians and Muslims, often without distinction.

But claims of Christian “persecution” in Nigeria have found traction online among the US and European right in recent weeks.

For years, Christians have been systemically persecuted in Nigeria, with Muslim terrorist groups and militias periodically raiding, raping, murdering, and enslaving Christian civilians in the northern part of the country.

According to a recent article in Catholic Vote, “[F]rom 2019 to 2023, a total of 55,910 people were killed,” and “21,621 people were abducted.” During this four-year timespan, Nigeria “saw an average of eight attacks per day involving killings and/or abductions.” This has continued to this day, with “more than 7,000 Christians killed in Nigeria during the first 220 days of 2025.”

Yet Christian leaders continue to bury their heads in the sand about this crisis. In a recent speech, Pope Leo XIV carried on the unimpressive legacy of his predecessor by directing his righteous ire on Western nations being too inhospitable to immigrants: “With the abuse of vulnerable migrants, we are witnessing, not the legitimate exercise of national sovereignty, but rather grave crimes committed or tolerated by the state.”