Oil in Exchange for Security and Survival: Nigeria Through the Lens of Realism -By Vitus Ozoke, PhD

The central error that has plagued Western counterterrorism campaigns over the past two decades is not moral failure but strategic inconsistency. States initiate military action without the political will, economic alignment, or institutional permanence required to finish what they start. Nigeria now risks becoming the next, and possibly the most consequential, example of this failure.

Any U.S. military action against terrorist organizations operating in Nigeria must be evaluated not by its symbolism but by its durability. Limited, episodic strikes – however tactically successful – are strategically counterproductive. They degrade capabilities without destroying organizational leadership, territorial control, or ideological infrastructure. In doing so, they create what counterinsurgency theory has long warned against: a wounded adversary – still operational, still adaptive, and often more violent than before.

The Wire immortalizes that old street truth: You come at the king; you better not miss. That must now be the guiding principle of any United States military campaign against terrorists operating in Nigeria. If the recent U.S. strike in Nigeria is not followed by sustained military, intelligence, and logistical pressure, it will be remembered not as deterrence but as provocation. Anything less than total commitment will not only fail but also backfire catastrophically.

The most dangerous python is not the one coiled in the bush; it is the one you have wounded, enraged, and left alive with its head still attached to its body. A symbolic strike here, a Christmas Day bombing there, may grab headlines and satisfy the illusion of action, but symbolism does not defeat terrorism. Sustained pressure does. Counterterrorism is not an event; it is a system. It requires continuity of force projection, intelligence dominance, local capacity building, and, above all, political endurance. Without these elements, intervention accelerates state fragility rather than reversing it.

Nigeria today is a textbook case of this risk. It is Africa’s most populous country, its largest economy, and a critical node in West Africa’s security architecture. Nigeria exists within the formal structure of the international system, but internally it operates under conditions that approximate Hobbesian anarchy across significant portions of its territory. Although Nigeria is formally and technically sovereign, its internal security environment closely conforms to what Waltz would describe as subsystemic anarchy – a condition in which the state lacks a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within its territory. Boko Haram factions, Islamic State–aligned groups, jihadist groups, ethnic armed formations, bandit networks, predatory security forces, transnational trafficking networks, and criminal militias operate with increasing impunity and collectively erode state authority, thereby producing what Morgenthau would recognize as a collapse of political order into raw power competition.

Bola Tinubu’s Nigeria is a clear example of the anarchy of a weak state. In such environments, normative appeals to development, governance reform, or human rights are secondary. As Morgenthau insisted, order is the precondition for justice, not its product. Where coercive power is fragmented, governance becomes aspirational theater. From a realist standpoint, Nigeria’s insecurity is therefore not merely a domestic failure but a regional power vacuum that invites both non-state violence and great-power competition. Order precedes reform, and the notion that limited external military action can stabilize such an environment is not merely optimistic; it is analytically indefensible.

Therefore, any U.S. military action against terrorist organizations in Nigeria must be evaluated not by its moral intent, immediate lethality, or tactical precision, but by its effect on the balance of power between the state and its non-state armed challengers. Limited strikes that do not alter this balance are not neutral; they are destabilizing. They impose costs without eliminating adversaries, creating incentives for adaptation, diffusion, and escalation. From a realist perspective, this is not deterrence – it is strategic abrasion.

As Kenneth Waltz, a structural realist, argued in his Theory of International Politics, outcomes in an anarchic system are determined less by intentions than by capabilities and endurance. Realism begins with a simple premise: states act to preserve power and security, not to express virtue. When they forget this, foreign policy becomes episodic, incoherent, and ultimately destructive. The United States’ approach to counterterrorism in Africa has long suffered from this failure of realism – substituting symbolism for strategy and tactical action for structural commitment.

From this perspective, limited or episodic strikes are not benign. They alter incentives without resolving the underlying power imbalance. A wounded adversary that retains leadership, recruitment capacity, and territorial access in an anarchic system does not retreat or de-escalate. It adapts and seeks to restore equilibrium through violence. The counterinsurgency realist logic is simple: insurgents win by not losing. Counterinsurgency is a contest of systems, not events. Systems cannot be defeated by symbolic action. Limited strikes that disrupt but do not dominate territory conform precisely to this dynamic.

So, if the Christmas Day strike is all that Donald Trump intends to do – if it is merely a one-off “message” – Nigeria will soon discover a grim truth: terrorism will get worse, not better. History is merciless on this point. Half-measures embolden extremists. They interpret restraint as weakness and survival as victory. A Christmas Day bombing, however precise, is therefore not deterrence unless it is embedded in a durable architecture of pressure. Otherwise, it is provocation without resolution. Therefore, this cannot be a “one and done” campaign. It must be sustained and sustainable, or it must not happen at all. And sustainability is the keyword.

But there is a hard truth and an uncomfortable reality about sustainability. The United States does not sustain foreign military campaigns out of charitable or humanitarian concerns. It sustains them when they align with clear, material American interests. In fact, the core realist critique of prior U.S. interventions is not that they were forceful, but that they were interest-ambiguous. Sustained power projection requires sustained domestic justification, and that justification requires clear material benefit, not moral justification. This is not cynicism; it is the empirical record of American foreign policy. Like it or not, this has been the defining logic of Donald Trump’s foreign policy – and pretending otherwise is intellectual dishonesty. Call it crude. Call it transactional. Call it mercantilist. But above all, call it real, realist, and realistic.

Hans Morgenthau famously warned that foreign policy divorced from national interest becomes “a series of disconnected improvisations” rather than a strategy. That warning is particularly relevant to contemporary U.S. counterterrorism policy in Africa, nowhere more so than in Nigeria. In this respect, the Trump doctrine, often derided for its aberrative transactionalism, is not only a reversion to realist orthodoxy but also contains a strategic clarity that prior frameworks lacked. Alliances and security commitments endure when they are underwritten by material reciprocity, not moral abstraction. They are anchored in tangible strategic assets. The United States does not – and historically has not – maintain long-term military commitments without a tangible strategic return.

Ukraine’s mineral-for-security arrangement reflects this logic, not as innovation but as a return to first principles. Security cooperation explicitly tied to tangible American economic gain – hundreds of billions of dollars in rare earths and strategic minerals. Not vague promises. Not goodwill. Assets. Nigeria must be approached through the same lens because it presents an even stronger case. Nigeria’s oil and mineral wealth represent not only economic value but also strategic leverage. When such resources are controlled by a predatory elite rather than converted into state capacity, they weaken rather than strengthen sovereignty. Nigeria must be willing to make the same hard bargain. It has to be oil for security. That’s the deal that will save tens of millions of Nigerian lives. Nigeria sits on vast oil and mineral wealth, yet its people live under siege, terrorized by jihadists, bandits, and criminal networks while a tiny elite loots the state with impunity.

The current arrangement is morally indefensible and strategically insane. The contradiction is not accidental. Resource rents have insulated a narrow political and business elite from accountability while depriving the state of incentives to provide security and public goods. If Nigeria’s oil wealth is to be pledged to anyone, let it be pledged to the survival of the Nigerian people, not to the offshore accounts of political and business criminals who profit from chaos. A long-term U.S.–Nigeria security arrangement tied to American access to Nigerian oil and strategic minerals would serve as a mechanism for power consolidation. It would align U.S. incentives with Nigerian stability while depriving insurgent and criminal networks of the permissive environment on which they depend.

Critics will label such an arrangement neocolonial. Realism rejects this framing as irrelevant. The relevant question is not whether control is shared but whether power is effectively exercised. In the current equilibrium, Nigeria’s resources fund elite consumption and systemic disorder. Nigeria’s resource wealth has not translated into security or state capacity because it has been captured by a narrow elite whose interests are structurally misaligned with public order. Under a transactional security compact, those same resources would underwrite coercive capacity and territorial control. The distributional consequences would be politically disruptive but strategically clarifying.

Under these conditions, appeals to abstract sovereignty ring hollow. Realism does not fetishize sovereignty; it treats it as instrumental and measures it by outcomes. A state that cannot secure its population has already forfeited meaningful autonomy. Sovereignty that cannot protect life, property, or territory is as meaningless and useless as it is a legal fiction. Let me repeat: A long-term U.S.–Nigeria security compact, explicitly tied to American access to Nigerian oil and strategic minerals, would not constitute exploitation but rather the reallocation of national assets toward survival. It would convert extractive wealth from a tool of elite capture into an instrument of collective security.

My proposal is simple, blunt, and effective: U.S. security guarantees and sustained military operations in exchange for American control over Nigerian oil and long-term concessions for the extraction of strategic minerals. This is not exploitation. It is salvation through leverage. What better use of Nigeria’s oil wealth than trading it for the lives, safety, and future of over 220 million Nigerians? The alternative is not sovereignty; it is slow-motion state failure, where terrorists rule territory and elites steal what remains. If you put this arrangement to a referendum, it would pass with 99.9 percent approval. The remaining 0.1 percent would belong to the criminal political and business elite and their extended families – the only Nigerians for whom insecurity and disorder are profitable. But realism concerns itself with outcomes, not elite discomfort.

Sustainability also requires institutional anchoring. It demands a permanent U.S. military presence. The United States should demand a permanent military base in Nigeria as part of any security cooperation agreement. A permanent U.S. military base in Nigeria would serve both operational and symbolic functions. Strategically, it is indefensible that Africa’s most populous country and largest economy does not host a major U.S. military installation. Nigeria should be the natural headquarters – or at least the central hub – of U.S. Africa Command’s regional outposts.

Given Nigeria’s demographic weight, economic centrality, and geographic position, it is the logical location for a consolidated U.S. Africa Command presence. The absence of such a base reflects not prudence but strategic incoherence. From Nigeria, the U.S. can project power across West and Central Africa, counter jihadist networks, protect maritime routes in the Gulf of Guinea, contain rival powers expanding their footprint on the continent, and signal a long-term commitment to regional stability. Commitment is what terrorists fear most. A permanent presence deters adversaries not because it threatens violence but because it eliminates uncertainty about endurance. A base is not an occupation; it is a commitment.

The choice facing Donald Trump and U.S. policymakers is not whether to act in Nigeria but how seriously to act. Symbolic strikes and rhetorical commitments will not defeat terrorism. They will intensify it. A sustained campaign, grounded in transactional realism, resource-backed cooperation, and a permanent military presence, offers a credible path to stabilizing Africa’s most important state. Anything less is not restraint; it is negligence. History is unforgiving of half-wars. Nigeria cannot afford one. Neither, ultimately, can the United States.

To Donald Trump and the United States: finish the job or don’t start it. If the United States chooses to confront terrorism in Nigeria, it must do so with the intent to win, not to posture. That means no symbolic strikes. No calendar-based exits. No pretending that wounded enemies will somehow die quietly on their own. A wounded python still bites. A sustained, transactional, interest-aligned U.S. military campaign, backed by economic leverage and a permanent presence, is not only the most realistic but also the most effective option. It may be the last viable one.

It is realism or ruin. Realism offers no comfort, only clarity. It teaches that half-measures are not moderate; they are dangerous. Limited strikes without sustained commitment will not weaken terrorism in Nigeria; they will intensify it by disrupting without dominating. The United States must therefore choose between two coherent strategies: complete disengagement or durable engagement. The latter requires transactional alignment, resource-backed cooperation, and a permanent presence. Anything less is not prudence but illusion. Anything in between is not moderation; it is escalation by neglect. In an anarchic system, power abhors a vacuum. If the United States does not fill it in Nigeria, something far worse will.

Dr. Vitus Ozoke is a lawyer, human rights activist, and public affairs analyst based in the United States. He writes on politics, governance, and the moral costs of leadership failure in Africa.