We’ll get to Venezuela. But first…
On Christmas Day 2025, as families exchanged gifts and tried to ignore global nastiness, President Donald Trump delivered a present of his own: over a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles, launched from a Navy destroyer in the Gulf of Guinea into north-western Nigeria. “Let’s give a Christmas present,” Trump told aides who had planned the strike for Christmas Eve.
This briefly lit up our little screens; we took note, showed surprise, and muttered WTF. And then we went on with our end-of-year break. Now, in the light of the new year, the incident seems long ago, buried in history. But it needs to be aired.
Nigeria became the seventh country to receive American ordnance since Trump’s inauguration in January – a remarkable achievement for a man who promised voters he would end foreign wars and declared at his inaugural ball that his “proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” At 622 overseas bombings and counting, the unification is proceeding apace.
The Nigeria operation cost somewhere north of $25 million in missiles alone—each Tomahawk runs about $1.9 million, and the military also deployed 16 drone-launched munitions for good measure. This sounds expensive until you consider the Yemen campaign earlier this year, which burned through $1 billion in its first month, or Operation Midnight Hammer in June, when B-2 stealth bombers dropped 30,000-pound bunker-busters on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Peace, it turns out, doesn’t come cheap.
The target in Nigeria was reportedly a series of training camps for Ansaru, an Al-Qaeda affiliate. The administration framed the strike as part of a broader crusade against “radical Islamic terrorism”—a phrase that has returned to the White House lexicon with a vengeance. But the timing and the theatre suggest something more complex.
By striking in Nigeria, the Trump administration isn’t just fighting a local insurgency; it is planting a flag in Africa’s largest economy at a time when Chinese and Russian influence is surging across the Sahel. It is a flex. It is a way of saying that while the US may be withdrawing from NATO and traditional alliances, it reserves the right to deliver high-explosive payloads anywhere it pleases, without the tedious necessity of consulting allies or international bodies.
The domestic reaction has been tellingly muted. The “America First” base, which once cheered Trump’s rhetoric against “forever wars,” seems to have made a mental adjustment: it is not a war if you only use missiles. War is boots on the ground, body bags at Dover Air Force Base, and trillions spent on nation-building. A Tomahawk strike is just a high-tech version of a strongly worded letter.
But for the people in Zamfara State, the distinction is academic. Local reports suggest that while the missiles may have hit their targets, the collateral damage – destroyed infrastructure and civilian anxiety—is significant. More importantly, the strikes provide a powerful recruitment tool for the very groups they seek to dismantle.
Critics within the State Department (those few who remain) have warned that this “binary framing” could “open the fault lines of division that already exist in the country.” When the world’s most powerful military publicly takes sides in a religious narrative, the consequences ripple outward.
Military strikes cannot address the root causes of Nigeria’s instability: poverty, poor governance, and farmer–herder conflicts over scarce resources. Nigeria’s own Defence Minister has acknowledged that military action represents only 30 per cent of what’s needed. The other 70 per cent—governance, development, jobs—is harder to deliver from a destroyer in the Gulf of Guinea.
And the Sahel’s jihadist groups, unlike American missiles, don’t respect borders. Without addressing the broader regional crisis in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger – countries where Western forces have been expelled following coups – striking Nigerian camps may simply push fighters elsewhere.
But perhaps the greatest risk is the precedent now established. Seven countries bombed. 622 strikes. Over 100 killed in the Caribbean alone. And a president who genuinely believes he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.
At his inaugural ball eleven months ago, Trump told supporters: “We will measure our success not only by the battles we win but also by the wars that we end -and perhaps most importantly, the wars we never get into.”
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, posting on social media after the Nigerian strike, promised “more to come.”
One can only imagine what Easter might bring.
And now, of course, Venezuela. The arrest of Maduro has arguably a legal basis (in the US). He is under indictment for drug charges, and the administration did not have to consult with congress under the War Powers Act of 1973. This is same law that gave Obama cover when he went after Osama Bin Laden (there are numerous other examples from previous presidents). Of course, arguing legalities is a largely wasted breath – there is no “book of international laws” and no body which can impose any sanction, except the UN and they rarely find consensus – they have been gridlocked on political matters for decades.
But of course, it was never about the drugs (openly admitted by Trump when all he could talk about was the oil, boasting about “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground”). The US has all the oil it needs, but this action (which essentially amounts to a foreign coup) redirects tens of billions in revenue from Venezuelan heavy oil refineries (which are nationalised US plants) to refineries in the US south to be used for export purposes. And it chokes supply to China, who had a 20-year purchase arrangement with Venezuela. And Trump gets to point to cheering Venezuelans celebrating the removal of a deeply hated and evil man. That’s three for the price of one.
There is much irony and hypocrisy here that it sticks in the throat. I think I’ll leave it there for a while and perhaps write about it later when I can swallow again.
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick, Daily Friend and Currency News. His new book “It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership” is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.
[Image: https://picryl.com/media/an-air-to-air-front-view-of-a-b-52g-stratofortress-aircraft-from-the-416th-2ac5fd]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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