Nigeria turns a U.S. bombing threat into a partnership

The story of the spring is how Nigeria took a threat and made it a partnership. Months after President Trump warned of military action over the killing of Christians, the two governments were fighting the same war. American forces and the Nigerian military ran a string of coordinated strikes against the Islamic State branch in the northeast, and one operation in mid-May killed a senior commander the U.S. called the group's director of global operations. Each strike landed with the same careful staging: Washington announced first, Abuja confirmed, both insisting the operations happened at Nigeria's request.

That framing was the whole point. President Tinubu never accepted the genocide narrative, but he stopped arguing and started cooperating, and the cooperation kept widening. A few hundred U.S. troops had arrived to train Nigerian soldiers and were setting up at bases in Bauchi and Maiduguri. In early May the national security adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, flew to Washington and met Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, leaving with a working group meant to keep the intelligence and weapons flowing. The intervention threat had become leverage Nigeria could spend.

Washington was not the only capital being worked. Tinubu made a state visit to the United Kingdom, the first by a Nigerian leader in nearly four decades, and turned the pageantry into substance: a defence cooperation memorandum, British backing for more hardware and training, and a 746-million-pound deal to upgrade Nigeria's ports. Britain offered a second security partner that did not come wrapped in accusations.

The one relationship moving the other way was with South Africa. After two Nigerians died and anti-foreigner protests spread in late April, Abuja summoned Pretoria's acting envoy, stood up a crisis unit, and began registering citizens for voluntary evacuation. South Africa objected publicly to the evacuation plan, and the Nigerian Senate prepared a delegation to carry its anger to Pretoria's parliament. The security wins abroad did little to cool a quarrel rooted in how Nigerians are treated on the continent itself.