"Christianity is facing an existential threat in Nigeria," President Trump asserted on X last week. "The United States cannot stand by while such atrocities are happening there, and in numerous other Countries. We stand ready, willing, and able to save our Great Christian Population around the World!"
His concern is justified. Wars in various forms are being waged against Christians in a long list of countries including China, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Eritrea, and much of the Arab Middle East.
Mr. Trump also is correct to focus on Nigeria because, credible sources maintain, over the past 10-15 years more Christians have been killed there than in any other nation. Christians have been the victims of bombings, beheadings, rapes, the torching of churches and villages, and mass kidnappings.
This is not a new issue for Mr. Trump. In late 2020, his first administration designated Nigeria a "Country of Particular Concern" (CPC) citing the government's failure to adequately protect religious communities.
Not quite a year later, the Biden administration removed that designation, arguing that the Nigerian government was not "engaged" in the attacks, and that "climate change" was a primary driver of the conflicts.
President Trump recently reinstated the CPC designation and threatened to send troops into Nigeria "guns-a-blazing" to "completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities."
A rattled President Bola Ahmed Tinubu responded: "Nigeria stands firmly as a democracy governed by constitutional guarantees of religious liberty."
He argued, too, that terrorists are targeting Muslim as well as Christian communities.
I don't doubt that second claim because the two best-known terrorist groups operating in northern Nigeria, Boko Haram and the Islamic State-West Africa Province (ISWAP), are only too eager to slaughter Muslims reluctant to join the jihad.
As an Africa correspondent for The New York Times in the 1980s, I spent a fair amount of time in Nigeria, a country of 237 million people, roughly divided between Christians and Muslims, with the former a majority in the south and the latter a majority in the north.
In 1983, I covered a presidential election that was won by the incumbent Shehu Shagari, a devout Muslim. A few months later, he was overthrown in a military coup that installed as dictator Maj. Gen. Muhammadu Buhari, also a devout Muslim.
In 2015, after a decade on the sidelines, Mr. Buhari was democratically elected president and served eight years. During that period, writes Michael Rubin, a scholar at AEI, Mr. Buhari "nurtured Islamist extremism and tolerated violence perpetrated against Nigeria's Christians."
Mr. Buhari, like the late Mr. Shagari, is a Fulani, which is a large ethnic group, 35-45 million people, widely dispersed across more than 20 countries in West and Central Africa.
The Fulanis have a distinct language and history. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Fulani Muslim clerics and their followers waged jihads to establish imamates and caliphates in West Africa.
According to some reports, armed Fulani groups in Nigeria have killed more Christians than Boko Haram and ISWAP combined. And, though these Fulani militias are generally regarded as separate from Boko Haram and ISWAP, credible sources report links.
When I served as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission of International Religious Freedom from 2016 to 2018 a debate broke out regarding the Fulani militias: Were they Islamic terrorists or just nomadic herders in a conflict with sedentary Christian farmers – akin to cowmen and farmers in early 20th century Oklahoma? If the latter, it would be of no concern to USCIRF.
What seemed to me most likely was that the Fulani militias were driving Christians out of their ancestral lands for economic benefit and justifying their violence based on theology.
So, even if Mr. Tinubu (a Muslim but a member of the large Yoruba ethnic group) is doing his best to protect Nigeria's Christians, that mission cannot be easy to accomplish.
"I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action," Mr. Trump recently posted. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth responded: "Yes sir," adding that the Pentagon was "preparing for action."
I don't envy those assigned to plan such operations.
The U.S. military could undertake an advise, assist, and enable mission with the Nigerian military – akin to the partnership between U.S. forces and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that is battling the Islamic State in northeastern Syria. But that would require serious buy-in from Mr. Tinubu.
Direct military action, for example targeting terrorist leaders, would require exquisite intelligence in a region where that's difficult to develop.
Such operations could weaken the terrorists, but their decisive defeat seems improbable.
As I've written before, the Muslim Brotherhood, for almost a century, has been instigating a Grand Jihad against the West, not sparing Muslim leaders who decline to support them.
This conflict has assumed a variety of forms from Afghanistan to Somalia to Gaza to Nigeria to Mali.
In addition, as the Somali-born scholar Ayaan Hirsi Ali recently wrote, the violence now breaking out on Europe's streets "is the fruit of decades of indoctrination by the Muslim Brotherhood, the mother organization of modern extremism" whose "influence turns young minds into weapons."
Memo to President Trump: Kudos for recognizing that a War on Christians is being waged and that the Battle of Nigeria is a crisis to which most of the media, the U.N. and the broader "international community" have turned a blind eye.
But defending Christians from jihadis and other sworn enemies of the West (don't forget the Chinese Communists) will require a broad strategy combining all instruments of American national power – a sustained effort that will almost certainly need to span decades.
That said, may I emphasize: Thank you for your attention to this matter!