On Christmas Day, the United States carried out targeted airstrikes against Islamic State–affiliated militants in north-west Nigeria. The operation was modest in scale, limited in scope, and coordinated with Nigerian authorities. Yet its significance extends well beyond the immediate tactical results. The strikes represent an instance in which American power was exercised with moral clarity, naming and confronting a real evil that has too often been obscured by diplomatic timidity.
For years, Christian communities in Nigeria have endured relentless violence at the hands of Islamist groups. Churches have been burned, priests kidnapped and murdered, entire villages emptied through terror. While Nigerian officials insist that such violence affects Muslims and Christians alike, the reality is that Christians are targeted with particular ferocity, often explicitly because of their faith.
Western governments have frequently responded to this reality with equivocation. Violence is described as “intercommunal conflict”, extremist Islamic ideology is reduced to “criminality”, and religion is carefully excised from official language, as though refusing to name the motivation might somehow diminish its force. The result has been paralysis. When evil is not named, it is rarely confronted.
The U.S. strikes broke, at least momentarily, from this pattern. President Trump explicitly framed the action as a response to the slaughter of Christians, signalling that religious persecution is not an abstraction but a concrete injustice demanding response. This matters. Moral seriousness begins with truthful description. Islamic State militants are not generic “bandits”. They are ideologically driven actors animated by a vision fundamentally hostile to Christianity and to any society that refuses submission to Islam.
From a moral perspective, the use of force is rarely to be celebrated. But neither is it to be dismissed as inherently illegitimate. The Christian tradition, has always held that political authorities bear responsibility for the protection of the innocent. When peaceful means fail, coercive force may be not only permissible but obligatory. To allow the systematic slaughter of vulnerable communities when one has the means to intervene is not restraint — it is dereliction.
Critics will argue that American military action risks escalation or entanglement. Such concerns deserve consideration, but they cannot become an excuse for habitual inaction. The strike in Nigeria was not an open-ended intervention or another nation-building exercise. It was a targeted response to identifiable perpetrators of mass violence. Prudence does not demand passivity; it demands proportion, clarity of aim, and moral conviction.
There is also a broader civilisational question at stake. The West’s reluctance to defend persecuted Christians abroad reflects a deeper uncertainty about its own moral inheritance. A culture uneasy with its religious roots finds it difficult to justify action taken in defence of religious communities. Yet Christianity remains the most persecuted faith in the world, and silence in the face of that fact corrodes both moral credibility and political seriousness.
The strike in Nigeria will not end persecution. No single action could. But it signals something long absent from Western foreign policy: a willingness to recognise that certain evils are not merely unfortunate but intolerable, and that power, rightly ordered, has a role in restraining them.
Force alone cannot save souls. But it can, at times, save lives. And when lives are being taken precisely because of faith, refusing to act is not neutrality. It is complicity.
