By Abdul Lauya
When the United States under Donald Trump designates other nations as “Countries of Particular Concern,” the irony is deafening.
Now, with Trump’s recent threat to “invade” Nigeria over alleged religious or governance concerns, the time has come to flip the label.
If there is anyone deserving of that designation, it is Donald Trump himself, a President of Particular Concern.
Trump’s foreign policy history reads like a catalogue of coercion, chaos, and contradiction.
The self-styled defender of democracy has often deployed the rhetoric of moral superiority while trampling on the very principles he preaches.
Under his earlier tenure, America withdrew from global accords, weakened multilateral institutions, and elevated brute force over diplomacy.
The idea of invading Nigeria, a sovereign African nation, only underscores that neo-imperial instinct that has long defined U.S. engagement with the world.
From Afghanistan to Iraq and Libya, America’s self-appointed role as “world police” has left behind smouldering ruins rather than flourishing democracies.
In Afghanistan, two decades of military occupation collapsed into a chaotic withdrawal that returned the Taliban to power.
In Iraq, an invasion justified by false claims of weapons of mass destruction unleashed sectarian war and regional instability whose aftershocks still reverberate.
Libya, once the most prosperous nation in Africa, was reduced to a fractured state after NATO’s intervention, an operation championed by Washington.
Each episode was justified in the name of freedom and security, yet all ended in humanitarian disaster.
The human toll, millions displaced, economies ruined, societies broken, speaks louder than any press statement from Washington.
The United States, under Trump, has consistently behaved as though international law is a tool to be used against others, not a rule to be followed.
It ignores the United Nations when convenient, bypasses global consensus when opposed, and imposes sanctions or military action whenever its geopolitical interests dictate.
Trump’s renewed posturing against Nigeria follows the same script, moral posturing masking political arrogance.
By designating Nigeria a “Country of Particular Concern,” Washington assumes the role of global arbiter of virtue, as if its own history of racial strife, gun violence, and foreign meddling qualifies it to lecture others on governance and human rights.
Trump’s language and threats betray a dangerous worldview, one that sees sovereignty as negotiable and other nations as pawns in America’s domestic political theatre.
His statements about Nigeria echo a broader disdain for Africa, once infamously described by him in vulgar terms.
Nigeria has been battling Boko Haram insurgency since 2009, paying a steep price in lives and resources to defend its sovereignty and people.
Where was Donald Trump, the self-acclaimed defender of democracy and global peace, when Boko Haram’s terror reached its peak during his first tenure?
For years, as Nigeria fought one of the most vicious insurgencies on the continent, neither Trump nor his so-called “world police” America deemed it genocidal or worthy of global alarm.
It is only now, over sixteen years into Nigeria’s struggle, that Trump suddenly claims to have discovered genocide, a convenient realization that exposes the hypocrisy of both the man and the country he represents.
For a man whose administration separated migrant children from their parents, banned Muslim-majority countries, and emboldened white nationalist groups, the moral authority to label any nation as “of concern” is, at best, laughable.
It is therefore fair and urgent, to return the label.
Donald Trump, by his record of reckless rhetoric, divisive politics, and destabilizing foreign adventures, fits the description of a President of Particular Concern.
The world has seen what happens when America’s self-righteous crusades go unchecked.
The scars of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya stand as silent indictments of a country that often wages war without accountability.
Nigeria must reject any attempt to replay that history on African soil.
If Washington insists on acting as the world’s moral compass, then it must first clean its own mirror, beginning with the man who once again threatens to turn diplomacy into destruction.
Donald Trump is not the world’s savior.
He is, unmistakably, a ‘President of Particular Concern’ to Nigeria in particular, and Africa in general.
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