MISSILES WITHOUT MORALITY: Trump and Netanyahu as self-appointed defenders of the faith, ballistic crusades of Empire in Nigeria {OPINION}
By Dr. HUSEYN ZAKARIA
“Powerful nations seldom speak the plain truth. They bury it, not from ignorance, but because truth would spoil their schemes. They cloak themselves in fine-sounding words, precision, security, liberation and shared values, while hiding their true objectives; the suffering they cause, and any responsibility.”
I must explain why I have chosen to write this piece now. I have read countless pieces from every side on America’s deepening grip on Nigeria’s affairs. As a Nigerian Muslim born on the very day our nation won its independence, I feel a burning duty to raise my voice. I stand as a witness to what feels like the slow occupation of a once-sovereign country by the world’s most power monger; President Donald Trump, who has crowned himself the Defender of Christianity. Peaceful Muslims who have shared villages, markets, and prayers with Christian neighbours for generations are now being torn apart by his words and missiles, branded as enemies in a conflict he invented. This is the fire behind my words.
Powerful nations seldom speak the plain truth. They bury it, not from ignorance, but because truth would spoil their schemes. They cloak themselves in fine-sounding words, precision, security, liberation and shared values, while hiding their true objectives; the suffering they cause, and any responsibility. As 2025 just ended, and 2026 just begins, the world stands on the edge of fresh great-power strifes. Under Donald Trump, the United States has revived this deceit with brazen arrogance. Driven by his alleged fierce religious convictions, he has proclaimed himself the self-chosen defender of Christianity. The missile strikes on Nigerian soil, deliberately aimed at Muslim-majority regions yet sold as holy rescue for beleaguered Nigerian Christians, revive the old war of crusaders in all their hypocrisy and cruelty: lofty moral claims wielded as a blunt weapon for boundless domination. Whereas all Trump’s boasted peace agreements crumble across the globe, exposing the hollow lie of his “peace through strength.” The stark truth blazes forth without mercy: this is no charity; it is naked empire-building by missile, where deadly weapons are dressed up as divine kindness, and the lives of distant Muslim peoples are dismissed as worthless in a grotesque spectacle staged for a Christian audience back home.
History indeed, repeats itself with chilling cunning, not always in the same dress, but always with the same dark purpose. The medieval crusades marched beneath the cross, plundering distant lands and killing natives under the pretence of shielding the faithful while seizing their wealth, lands and usurping power. Though today’s crusades advance under banners of humanitarian aid, counter-terrorism, and religious liberty. Trump has anointed himself the new defender of the faith, with raining bombs on Muslim communities in northwest Nigeria while claiming to save Nigerian Christians from jihadist peril. The old lie and deceptions endure: some lives, those tied to Western-favoured faiths, are deemed priceless, while others are disposable; some nations imagine a God-given licence to slaughter; and violence is sanctified when the mighty wield it in the name of the God! This poisonous creed has already laid waste to innocent peoples. Afghanistan’s twenty-year occupation ended in humiliating flight, leaving a shattered land and mountains of abandoned arms for the Taliban. Iraq was torn apart without true rebuilding, birthing endless insurgencies and sectarian slaughter. Libya sank into permanent anarchy, a broken state spawning extremists. Syria became a proxy killing ground, its people crushed between weary superpowers and a wicked neighbour. In none of these disasters did foreign intervention deliver lasting peace, justice, or stability or economic prosperity; only voids filled with rage, radicalisation, polarization and unending grief. The mightiest army on earth has brought neither moral clarity nor enduring order; it has only deepened the chaos, with ordinary folk, most often Muslims, bearing the heaviest, and most unbearable cost across Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Syria, etc.
Nigeria must not be reduced to the next tragic chapter in this chronicle of ruin: The U.S. strikes in northwest Nigeria, unleashed on Christmas Day 2025 and brazenly hailed by Trump as a “Christmas present” to the world, reveal this neo-crusader spirit in its ugliest and dreaded form. Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from a warship in the Gulf of Guinea, backed by Reaper drones, struck two purported ISIS-linked camps in the Bauni forest of Sokoto State, a predominantly Muslim region with no history of ISIS. Making us to believe that several militants were killed in what was called a joint operation with Nigerian forces. Trump celebrated it as a “powerful and deadly strike” against “ISIS terrorist scum,” deliberately casting it as salvation for persecuted Nigerian Christians facing Sahel jihadists, positioning himself as Christianity’s global guardian against Islam. Yet the boast of flawless precision collapses against the grim reality on the ground: fragments from these “surgical” weapons scattered into peaceful villages, spreading terror even where no lives were said to be taken.
In the quiet village of Jabo in Sokoto’s Tambuwal area, a simple farming community of Muslim families with no trace of ISIS and no hatred for Christians, a missile fragment exploded in a field near the local health centre, igniting fires and sheer panic. Residents fled in horror, their hard-won calm shattered in a place long known for harmony between faiths. Fortunately, no one died, not even livestock or crops got burnt, but livelihoods were ruined, fields scorched, trust broken and enmity sewn. In addition, hundred of kilometres away in Offa, Kwara State, similar debris, they want us to believe, wrecked homes and “wounded” innocents. Officials shrug these off as “harmless debris” or minor errors, but the truth is stark: long-range weapons cannot infallibly spare sleeping Muslim families when wind shifts or systems fail. Thus, we can all bear witness that “Precision” is a mere Department of War (Pentagon) propaganda; the outcome remain terror, destruction, casualties, and division.
Missiles need not kill or destroy, they terrify, scar souls, and fracture societies. Trump’s swaggering claim to defend the faith, loudly championing Christian safety to thrill his evangelical followers while pounding Muslim soil with ordnance, threatens to ignite religious warfare in a land whose deepest wounds come not from doctrine but from failed governance, grinding poverty, corrupt elites, rampant arms, endless loans, unfulfilled promises, deserted hospitals, fiscally sterved education and crumbling institutions. While Nigeria’s Constitution declares plainly: no state religion, equal citizenship, freedom of belief, sovereignty in the people. To recast our struggles as a sacred clash between Christianity and Islam is legally false and politically explosive. The narrow escape in these Muslim-majority communities, where Christians live freely, and Muslims have shared life without enmity, was no small mercy; one stray bomb could have unleashed communal slaughter that the self-proclaimed defender would never have to witness or answer for. Chaos serves empires; genuine peace does not. Christians especially from South Eastern Nigeria live in the predominantly Muslim northern part far better secured than in their original states. Take Kano and Zamfara as examples, ask any igboresident his experience with the people he lives, and you will be surprised.
Selective Morality: The Crisis in Palestine and Broader Unfairness:
This glaring hypocrisy shines brightest in Palestine, where unwavering American backing has enabled devastation and reckless human and property destruction on a monstrous and barbaric scales, Christian and Muslim women, children, and elderly pulverized beneath “defensive” barrages funded and shielded by the very power now posing as Christianity’s champion and protector. For the Global South, faith in Western fairness lies in ruins; intervention is not guided by universal principle but by cold calculation, favouring certain faiths for reasons of bigotry, race, alliance, or convenience. When humanitarian fury is doled out selectively, fierce for Christians, mute for Muslims, it becomes mere propaganda; when justice comes with conditions, it is sham. Trump’s loud vows to defend Christianity in Nigeria ring utterly hollow. The question burns: is this sincere belief, or cynical manipulation or just religious bigotry?
The absurdity deepens when on 1st January, 2026, Israeli Netanyahu declared Israel would open a “new front” to shield Christian communities across Africa and the Middle East, expressly naming Nigeria as apreferreddestination. Speaking to Christian Zionists, he framed it as a fight for “hearts and minds” against “radical Islam,” insisting Israel alone truly protects persecuted Christians. He went further to promise a worldwide alliance to defend Judeo-Christian values against threats from Iran and others. Yet this pledge falls flat, indeed, it reeks of shameless deceit, for countless observers who have watched Israel’s campaign in Gaza claim the lives of several thousands of Christian families too: innocent babies, mothers, grandparents, brothers, and sisters killed in bombings that have shocked the world. How dare a leader stained by such bloodshed now present himself as saviour of Christians abroad? Many Nigerians, painfully aware of Palestinian suffering, rightly ask whether welcoming such “protection” means turning a blind eye to blatant hypocrisy, and risking deeper religious division at home instead of unity against genuine dangers. He forgot to promise similar protection to the Christians of Venezuela, Cuba and Greenland of Denmark who 99.99% against Mr. Trump. What a double standard in defence of Christianity.
Possible Gains and Real Dangers from the Strikes:
Scholars such as Olayinka Ajala of Leeds Beckett University note short-term gains from the U.S. strikes: better intelligence and surveillance after America’s drone base in Niger closed, possible access to advanced equipment once withheld over human rights worries, help against cross-border threats from Niger and Burkina Faso, and a clear warning to terrorists. Yet the dangers loom large if Nigeria does not firmly steer its own counter-terror efforts. We, as independent nation, risk surrendering control of vital intelligence, with America holding the data from its flights and choosing what to share. Nigerian forces must swiftly capitalize on disrupted camps, or terrorists may splinter into smaller, deadlier groups, as Boko Haram did before. Our able Minister of Defence must act quickly and professionally against such schemes.
Above all, Trump’s insistent framing as saviour of Christians has provoked real anger among Muslim leaders and communities, who feel it deliberately divides the nation by faith. The government must speak plainly: this cooperation must serve every Nigerian, not single out any group. Reactions remain sharply split, some cheer the blows against terrorists, others fear for our sovereignty.
The Hidden Cost of “Help”: Trump’s Deal-Making and Nigeria’s Mineral Wealth:
Nigerians ask the hard questions with good reason: Trump, as is known to the world, gives nothing without demanding payment, as his record shows. In Ukraine, a 2025 pact granted America rights to lithium and rare earths in exchange for aid and rebuilding funds.
Similarly, the hidden economic demands behind Trump’s support for Netanyahu against the defenceless Palestinians are multifaceted: they include direct personal enrichment, the advancement of a corporate‑friendly “economic peace” that bypasses Palestinian rights, the securing of vital campaign funding from pro‑Israel donors, and the exploitation of Gaza’s reconstruction as a business opportunity. Together, these interests reveal a transactional approach to foreign policy, where the suffering of Palestinians is overshadowed by the pursuit of private and political gain.
So also in Venezuela, though the bargains between Trump and Venezuela’s opposition were not a genuine pact for democratic transition which the opposition swallowed in hopes of obtaining military backing against Maduro. And as soon as Maduro was removed, Trump bypassed the opposition and enforced those conditions directly through a more compliant interim government. Thus,the opposition’s hope for a democratic opening was traded for U.S. absolute control over oil, security cooperation, and the exclusion of all rival powers: Russia and China, an outcome that highlights the transactional nature of Trump’s foreign policy.
The grabbing of Greenland is the next excursion. On Friday in a White house press briefings, he categorically reiterated that he must annexe Greenland by peace or by force. Whichever the circumstances call for, and damned the consequences: the collapse of NATO and the losing the perennial supports of the European Union in all his future projects. Or better put, the beginning of the 3rd world war!
Thus, with these evidences many sensible Nigerians dread the same price here after the strikes and tightening military links. Nigeria indeed, sits on vast wealth, lithium in Nasarawa and Kaduna, gold in Zamfara and Osun, rare earths and tin in Plateau, minerals essential for modern technology and defence in Sambisa, Chad basin and elsewhere.
As of early 2026, no open agreement ties U.S. military support to Nigerian mining concessions yet. Yet American appetite for Nigerian minerals grows amid rivalry with China, and Trump’s habit of linking aid to profit fuels alarm.
Northern regions struck in 2025, abundant in these treasures, could become targets for opaque deals favouring U.S. firms. We have seen the template: in late 2025, Trump-mediated peace in Congo and Rwanda included American access to rare earths. Nigeria’s recent health aid, focused on Christian facilities and reforms protecting Christian areas, hints at similar deadly strings. These pacts bind nations for decades, breeding dependence. This is modern colonization reborn; missiles clear the way for corporate takeover, “security assistance” paid for with unspecified and unquantifiable national riches, local elites complicit in selling what belongs to all. It is no equal alliance; it is outright exploitation, modern colonialism and slavery. The just military weapons said to have arrived Nigeria must quickly be paid immediately, and owned and operated by our military force.
Leaders’ Role: Debt and Loss of Independence:
Empire rarely forces entry; it is usually invited in. In nations like Nigeria, leaders facing hardship, loss of confidence, economic crisis, opaque governance, shrinking civic space and disputed elections, may trade sovereignty for foreign political and military backing should there be need in the nearest future.
Today’s colonialism wears subtler chains: debt leverage, security pacts, aligned narratives, elite reliance. Leaders who summon foreign missiles to solve domestic failures seldom keep authority or national honour; in such circumstances, “aid” soon becomes captivity and slavery.
Failing Peace Deals and Growing World Tension: A Warning to the World:
Trump’s much-trumpeted peace efforts lie in ruins in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Cambodia and beyond, revealing frailty masquerading as strength, paving the way for yet more adventures cloaked in selective piety. Trump’s hunger for dominance reaches far. In 2025, he launched a full-scale campaign against Venezuela: naval blockade of its oil exports, dozens of strikes on tankers, and finally the dramatic capture of President Nicolás Maduro, flown to America for trial. Trump vowed the U.S. would “run” Venezuela and secure its immense oil reserves, the world’s largest proven deposits. Though production has fallen to around one million barrels daily from years of mismanagement and sanctions, the aim is clear: revive output under American control, directing the heavy crude vital for certain refineries straight to U.S. interests. This is no mere fight against drugs or dictatorship; it is raw economic conquest. Another interesting testimony was his openness in inviting Russia and China to come for the new Venezuelan oil.
Now Trump turns covetous eyes to Greenland, refusing to disavow force despite Denmark’s firm rejection and NATO ties. Don’t you this will embolden Putin to swallow Ukraine whole, or China to annexe Taiwan, or Morocco to swallow Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic(SADR)? What lesson does he teaches the world, that might makes right, and the superpowers and the so powerful may simply take whatever they desire by force also? Who knows what they do to help IPOB cessiding Nigeria?
This appetite echoes America’s long record of armed intrusion around the world since 1950, invariably justified as safeguarding security or spreading democracy, yet frequently only serving her economic mastery. From Korea (1950-1953) and the tragic Vietnam War (1955-1975), to repeated incursions in Nicaragua (1855 through 1989), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), the Gulf War (1991) and Iraq invasion (2003-2011), Afghanistan (2001-2021), Libya (2011), Syria (2014-present), Yemen (2002, 2009-2021), and countless others. Lebanon (1982-1983), Haiti (1994, 2004), Somalia (1992-1993, 2007), Bosnia (1993-1995), Kosovo (1999), Pakistan drone campaigns (2004-present), and now the Venezuela, the catalogue is staggering. These actions, drawn from verified history, expose a recurring pattern: force deployed against weaker states in the name of peace and security, while the true prize is often oil, minerals, markets, or strategic foothold.
Let me sound this alarm to my leaders, before the world: Donald Trump’s insatiable thirst for power is kindling grave peril. He is twisting democracy into a personal weapon, sowing hatred that may one day defnately rebound on ordinary Americans and their nation. America will never remain the strongest military power for eternity. If no force restrains him from seizing my Nigeria, perhaps with Israel soon planting a military base on our soil, who will stand against the next target? The international community must recognize this for what it truly is: not defence, but predatory conquest that endangers peace everywhere. Americans, please, heed this warning: the path your leader treads threatens your own liberties and risks making your country despised across the globe. In the African adage we say: “a hundred days for the thief, and one day for owner”. In America they say: “the pitcher goes so often to the well that it is broken at last. Biblically, “your sin will you out”.
Nigeria at a Turning Point: Rejecting False Defenders:
Nigeria stands at a fateful crossroads: accept the perilous patronage of a self-anointed defender of the faith, bartering resources for missiles and courting decades of control, or reclaim true independence through justice, accountability, inclusion, and authentic self-determination. No people win liberty from missiles launched in faith’s name; no nation endures coercion disguised as divine favour; no leader earns history’s honour by hawking sovereignty to foreign crusaders.
Empires rise and fall, but the oppressed endure. Nigeria’s destiny rests not in the schemes of defender’s of faith, but in the unyielding resolve of Nigerians to refuse becoming pawns in their holy war, or his relentless resource hunt. Missiles fly far; truth flies farther. May this moment ignite unbreakable resistance, the full truth, bold and eternal.
Finally, Nigeria is at a Civilisational Crossroads:
Nigeria, now doubt, faces a choice that will define its future. It can accept the logic of crusader intervention, allowing foreign powers to define its crises, militarize its diversity, and exploit its fragility, or it can insist on a harder path, thus:
• constitutional accountability
• security reform rooted in intelligence and justice
• economic policy with transparency
• political competition without intimidation
These are not glamorous solutions. They do not come with press conferences or missile footage. But they are the only ones that preserve nations.
May God help my country, Nigeria!
