America's First Strikes in Nigeria Signal a New Sahel Doctrine
On Christmas Day 2025, American missiles hit Nigerian soil for the first time. The operation targeted ISIS militants near Sokoto—but its true target was the collapsing security architecture of West Africa, where French withdrawal and Russian expansion have left Washington with fewer options and...
Christmas in Sokoto
On December 25, 2025, while Americans unwrapped presents, Tomahawk cruise missiles unwrapped a new chapter in African security. The strikes in Nigeria’s Sokoto State killed “multiple ISIS terrorists,” according to U.S. Africa Command. They also killed something else: the fiction that Washington could manage the Sahel’s collapse from a distance.
The operation was modest by Pentagon standards. MQ-9 Reapers and cruise missiles, coordinated with Nigerian intelligence, targeted militants near the spiritual seat of West Africa’s largest historical Islamic polity. But scale obscures significance. These were America’s first acknowledged direct strikes on Nigerian soil—a country of 220 million people, Africa’s largest economy, and Washington’s most important security partner on the continent. The question is not whether the strikes succeeded tactically. It is what door they opened.
The Vacuum That Demanded Filling
To understand why American missiles fell on Sokoto, look first at what fell apart across the Sahel.
The G5 Sahel joint force—once the flagship of Western-backed regional security—unraveled after Mali’s 2022 exit, followed by Burkina Faso and Niger in late 2023. The UN’s MINUSMA peacekeeping mission in Mali ended by December 31, 2023. French forces withdrew from all three countries following military coups. The architecture that was supposed to contain jihadist expansion didn’t just weaken. It evaporated.
Into this void stepped the Alliance of Sahel States—a mutual defense pact between Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger that explicitly rejects Western security frameworks. Russia’s Wagner Group (now Africa Corps) provides the muscle. The AES has failed to stem violence. But failure at counterterrorism is not the same as failure at politics. The juntas survive. Their Western-aligned predecessors did not.
This creates a hydraulic problem. Jihadist groups—JNIM, ISWAP, and newer formations like Lakurawa—don’t respect the sovereignty distinctions that diplomats draw on maps. When pressure releases in one zone, it builds in another. The Sahel now accounts for over half of global terrorism deaths. And the pressure is flowing south.
Nigeria sits at the bottom of this gradient. The country already faced Boko Haram and its splinter factions for over a decade. Now it absorbs spillover from the north. Lakurawa, which emerged in Nigerian border zones after French forces left the Sahel, represents not indigenous insurgency but overflow—militants who found new operating space when their previous sanctuaries became contested by rival armed groups rather than state forces.
The December strikes targeted both ISIS-linked militants and Lakurawa. The distinction matters less than the geography. Nigeria is now the platform for operations that cannot be conducted from Niger, Mali, or Burkina Faso.
The Consent Question
The legal architecture supporting the strikes reveals as much as the missiles themselves.
AFRICOM stated the operation was conducted “at the direction of the President of the United States and the Secretary of War, and in coordination with Nigerian authorities.” Nigeria’s foreign minister confirmed that Abuja provided intelligence and granted explicit approval. President Bola Tinubu’s government framed this as partnership, not subordination.
This consent architecture is crucial. Unlike Somalia, where American strikes occur in what Washington treats as essentially ungoverned space, Nigeria is a functioning state with a democratically elected government, a large military, and acute sensitivity about sovereignty. The strikes required Tinubu to accept something no Nigerian president had accepted before: American kinetic operations on Nigerian territory.
Why did he say yes?
The answer lies in capability gaps that Nigerian officials rarely discuss publicly. Nigeria’s air force struggles with maintenance. Its intelligence services lack the persistent surveillance that American platforms provide. The State Department notes that since 2000, a Status of Forces Agreement has established the legal framework for U.S. military personnel in Nigeria—but personnel presence and strike authorization are different categories entirely. The SOFA enabled training and intelligence sharing. It did not contemplate Tomahawks.
Tinubu’s calculus appears straightforward: accept American help to address a threat his own forces cannot contain, while framing the cooperation as Nigerian-led. The foreign minister emphasized that Nigeria “gave US intelligence” rather than received American direction. Sovereignty preserved through semantic arrangement.
But consent from one government does not bind its successors. And the precedent—that a Nigerian president can authorize foreign strikes on Nigerian soil—now exists regardless of how this particular president describes it.
The Franchise Problem
The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force was designed for al-Qaeda. It has since been stretched to cover organizations that did not exist when Congress voted, in countries Congress never contemplated.
ISIS-West Africa Province pledged allegiance to the Islamic State in 2015. Under executive branch interpretations that have accumulated across four administrations, this pledge brings ISWAP under the AUMF’s umbrella as an “associated force.” The legal theory: Congress authorized force against those responsible for 9/11 and their associates; ISIS emerged from al-Qaeda in Iraq; therefore ISIS affiliates worldwide inherit the original authorization.
This is legal origami. But it is legal origami that courts have declined to unfold.
The Nigeria strikes extend this logic further. Lakurawa is not an ISIS affiliate in any formal sense—it emerged from the wreckage of Sahelian security collapse, recruiting from communities displaced by both jihadists and counterinsurgency operations. Yet the strikes targeted Lakurawa alongside ISIS militants, bundling a local armed group into the global war on terror’s authorization structure.
The franchise model creates self-reinforcing expansion. Each new affiliate that pledges to ISIS technically falls under existing executive interpretations. Each strike against such affiliates establishes operational precedent. Each precedent makes the next strike easier to authorize. The 2001 AUMF, designed for a specific enemy in a specific moment, becomes a perpetual motion machine for counterterrorism operations worldwide.
Congress has noticed. Efforts to pull war powers back from the White House have intensified after recent strikes in multiple theaters. But noticing and acting are different verbs. The AUMF remains unrepealed, and repeal without replacement would create legal chaos for ongoing operations.
The Great-Power Overlay
Russia’s presence in the Sahel is not incidental to American decisions about Nigeria. It is central.
When Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger expelled French and American forces, they did not create security vacuums. They created security substitutions. Wagner (now Africa Corps) provides regime protection, extraction security, and a veneer of counterterrorism capacity. The juntas survive not because Russian mercenaries defeat jihadists—they largely do not—but because the mercenaries protect the juntas from coups.
This creates a paradox for Washington. American counterterrorism doctrine emphasizes working “by, with, and through” local partners. But the local partners in the core Sahel now work with Moscow. Nigeria remains the exception—a large, English-speaking democracy with decades of American security cooperation and no interest in Russian alternatives.
The December strikes signal that Washington will protect this exception. The message to Abuja: we will do what your northern neighbors’ new patrons cannot. The message to Moscow: Nigeria is not available.
But the signal carries costs. Nigerian public opinion on American military presence is mixed at best. Analysts note that while some Nigerians welcome action against militants, others view foreign strikes as sovereignty violations regardless of government consent. The Sokoto Caliphate’s historical resonance—the strikes occurred near the seat of 19th-century Islamic governance—adds symbolic weight that Washington may not have calculated.
Christian minorities in northern Nigeria may welcome American intervention against groups that have targeted their communities. Muslim elders in the same region may see crusader echoes. Both reactions are rational responses to the same event.
The Tinubu Gamble
Nigeria’s president faces a calculation that no amount of American firepower can resolve for him.
Tinubu came to power in 2023 promising economic reform and security improvements. He has delivered painful subsidy removals and currency adjustments. Security improvements have proven harder. Boko Haram and its successors continue attacking. Banditry in the northwest kills thousands annually. The state struggles to project force into its own territory.
Accepting American strikes offers tactical relief. It also creates political vulnerabilities. Tinubu’s domestic opponents can frame him as outsourcing sovereignty. His regional relationships—particularly with AES states that have made anti-Western positioning central to their legitimacy—become more complicated. And if the strikes fail to produce lasting security gains, he bears the blame for a foreign intervention that didn’t work.
The alternative was worse. Doing nothing while militants expanded would have demonstrated incapacity more clearly than accepting help. Tinubu chose the gamble that partnership with Washington would strengthen rather than weaken his position.
This gamble depends on American restraint. If Washington treats Nigerian consent as a blank check for expanded operations, Tinubu’s political exposure increases. If the strikes remain limited and Nigerian-framed, the arrangement may hold. The balance is delicate. It depends on actors in Washington and Abuja whose incentives do not perfectly align.
What Comes Next
The Nigeria strikes establish a template. Whether that template spreads depends on factors that extend well beyond Sokoto.
First, the operational question: do the strikes degrade militant capacity, or do they merely displace it? Decapitation tactics—killing leaders—become less effective as organizations age and develop succession mechanisms. ISWAP has survived leadership losses before. Lakurawa’s decentralized structure may prove even more resilient. If the strikes produce temporary disruption followed by reconstitution, pressure for additional strikes will build.
Second, the regional question: do other coastal West African states seek similar arrangements? Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Côte d’Ivoire all face jihadist pressure from the north. They lack Nigeria’s military capacity and strategic weight. If Nigeria’s precedent normalizes American kinetic operations in the region, smaller states may request similar support—creating a patchwork of bilateral strike authorizations that bypasses regional frameworks entirely.
Third, the domestic American question: does the Trump administration treat Nigeria as a model for Africa policy? The 2022 U.S. Strategy Toward Sub-Saharan Africa treated counterterrorism as “important but clearly secondary” to democracy and economic goals. The December strikes suggest a different emphasis. If kinetic counterterrorism becomes the primary tool of Africa engagement, the strategy document becomes historical artifact.
Fourth, the Russian response: does Moscow seek to exploit American intervention for propaganda purposes? Russian information operations have successfully framed Western security presence as neocolonial in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Nigeria’s larger, more diverse media environment is harder to dominate. But the attempt will come.
The most likely trajectory: additional strikes when intelligence identifies high-value targets, Nigerian government acquiescence so long as operations remain limited and framed as partnership, gradual normalization of American kinetic presence in Nigerian security architecture. This is not a Somalia scenario—Nigeria’s state capacity and sovereignty sensitivities prevent that. But it is a new normal nonetheless.
The Architecture That Isn’t
The Sahel’s security architecture has not collapsed. It has been replaced.
The old architecture—G5 Sahel, MINUSMA, French operations, ECOWAS coordination—assumed that African states would work together under Western tutelage to contain jihadist expansion. This assumption failed not because the architecture was poorly designed but because the states it depended on rejected it.
The new architecture is bilateral, transactional, and fragmented. Russia provides regime security to AES states. America provides strike capacity to Nigeria. China provides infrastructure and surveillance technology to multiple parties. No regional framework coordinates these efforts. No shared doctrine guides them. Each bilateral arrangement serves the immediate interests of its parties without reference to regional stability.
This is not a security architecture. It is a collection of security transactions.
The transactions may serve their parties’ interests. They will not address the underlying dynamics driving Sahelian instability: climate stress on pastoral livelihoods, demographic pressure on governance capacity, legitimacy deficits that jihadist movements exploit. Strikes can kill militants. They cannot create the conditions that would make militancy unattractive.
The December operation in Sokoto was tactically successful. Its strategic implications remain uncertain. What is certain is that the old assumptions about how West African security would be organized no longer apply. The new assumptions have not yet been articulated.
In their absence, missiles fill the silence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Why did the US strike Nigeria specifically rather than other Sahel countries? Nigeria remains the only major Sahel-adjacent state with both a functioning democratic government and decades of American security partnership. Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger expelled Western forces after military coups, leaving Nigeria as the sole viable platform for American operations against ISIS-linked groups in the region.
Q: Does Nigeria’s government support American military strikes on its territory? President Tinubu’s government explicitly authorized the December 2025 strikes and provided intelligence support. Nigerian officials have framed the operation as a partnership rather than foreign intervention, though domestic opinion remains divided on the question of sovereignty.
Q: What legal authority does the US use for strikes in Africa? The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, originally passed to target al-Qaeda after 9/11, has been interpreted by successive administrations to cover ISIS affiliates worldwide. This interpretation allows strikes against groups like ISIS-West Africa Province without new congressional authorization.
Q: Could American strikes spread to other West African countries? The Nigeria precedent creates a template that other coastal states facing jihadist pressure—Ghana, Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire—might seek to replicate. However, each arrangement would require bilateral negotiation and host-government consent, making rapid expansion unlikely.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- U.S. Africa Command Press Release - Official confirmation of the December 25, 2025 strikes and their stated objectives
- State Department Security Cooperation Fact Sheet - Background on the 2000 U.S.-Nigeria Status of Forces Agreement
- AP News: Mali UN Peacekeeping Withdrawal - Reporting on MINUSMA’s end and the broader collapse of Western security frameworks
- Vanguard Nigeria - Nigerian government statements on intelligence cooperation
- Euronews - Reporting on Nigerian domestic reactions and policy framing
- Military.com - Congressional responses to executive military actions
- RAND Corporation Evaluation of U.S. Security Sector Assistance in Africa - Analysis of American security cooperation effectiveness
