When the president announced that we might soon be taking “sweet” military action inside Nigeria, as he put it — in addition to cutting off all foreign aid to the country — he raised a lot of very urgent questions that need to be answered. The first question, of course, is what exactly this “sweet” military action will look like. Nigeria doesn’t have much in the way of anti-air technology, nor is its military capable of defeating LSU’s football team, much less the U.S. Army. So the options are pretty much limitless on this front — especially if you’re not a fan of the mercy rule or playing remotely fair. We could film the next Top Gun movie over West Africa in the next few weeks if we wanted to. And whatever you think of those movies, no serious person contests the fact that they featured some pretty sweet scenes.
The other important question that’s raised by Trump’s remarks is: Why are we sending any foreign aid to Nigeria to begin with? Why is there any foreign aid to suspend? When I asked that question yesterday, I genuinely had no idea what the answer was. I was aware of statistics showing that, since 2021, we’ve been sending roughly a billion dollars — yes, a billion dollars — every single year to Nigeria. And for the decade before that, we were giving them a half-billion dollars every year. Most of that money is supposedly earmarked for “humanitarian” and “economic” purposes.
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