Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
On Christmas Day, President Trump announced that US warships off the coast of Africa had launched air strikes against ISIS targets in northern Nigeria.
That certainly took the world by surprise. Two months ago, President Trump threatened to conduct military operations in Nigeria to protect Christians facing an “existential threat” and nobody believed him. And now, BAAM, the missiles fly.
We are told that the strikes were officially “requested” by the Nigerian government, which was eager not to incur the wrath of our president. But the Nigerians are still in denial over what is actually happening in their country, regurgitating the old fiction that the violence is targeting both Christians and Muslims alike.
As one Christian community leader told Truth Nigeria, a non-profit news organization with reporters on the ground where ISIS has been running wild, “these attackers are not just bandits. They don’t just steal. They target churches. They target Christian villages.”
They also like to kidnap young Christian girls from their schools and hold them captive, sometimes for years, using them as sex slaves for jihadi terrorists.
Dede Laugesen, president of the non-profit Save the Persecuted Christians, has just published a beautiful Gospel song dedicated to the missing children. It’s called “Bring the Children Home this Christmas.” Have a listen. I think you will enjoy it.
So how do missile strikes against jihadi strongholds in far-off Africa comport with the Trump doctrine of ending forever wars and refocusing our national enterprise to matters much closer to home?
As the president likes to remind us, he returned to office in January 2025 not to start wars but to end them, and so far this year he has played an outsize role in ending eight conflicts around the globe.
He vowed – and is already well along the road to succeeding – to end the madness of DEI, of boys in girls’ locker rooms and girls’ sports, of transgender indoctrination in our public schools.
He closed our southern border on Day One, exposing the Democrats’ fiction that only Congressional action could slow the flow of illegals into this country.
He is rebuilding our military, while at the same time ensuring we do not get bogged down in a war in Europe.
But he has also brought faith back to the White House and to our national discourse.
When the president designated Nigeria as a “country of particular concern” because of serious threats to religious freedom, he wasn’t just checking a box on some Congressman’s wish list. He was announcing a shift in the policy of the government of the United States. And now he has acted on it.
If you go around the globe and analyze this president’s policies, whether toward Russia, Ukraine, Communist China, or Europe, you can sum it up in a single phrase: Make Deals, not War.
Confrontation with Communist China over Taiwan is not inevitable, Trump is saying. The threat of a Europe-wide war with Russia over Ukraine does not have to dominate our lives, terrify us at night, and deplete our treasuries by day.
And while previous presidents have sought to intertwine the economies of the United States and China (and other adversaries and allies) in the belief that we could buy peace from adversaries and cooperation from friends, Donald Trump said no, trade must be reciprocal.
Trade must be constructed, not automatic. In other words, it must result from a deal.
Much has been said, mistakenly, about the “new isolationism” of the Republican Party and of our president. But this president has shown by his actions that he is no isolationist.
He joined Israel in eliminating the threat from the Iranian regime’s nuclear weapons programs. He reopened the Red Sea to international shipping by bombing the Houthis in Yemen. He is blowing up coke boats and threatening to recapture the oil fields in Venezuela that were stolen from American companies five decades ago. And much more.
President Trump has put an end to the era of Globalism, where unelected bureaucrats and global elites plunder our treasure and dictate our policies. But he has not shirked from our global responsibilities, as a force for good.
That is why he conducted those missile strikes in Nigeria, and why he has expended so much political capital to end wars around the world.
Make deals, not war. End globalism, but not our global responsibility. Those are the lessons of this first year of the renewed Trump presidency.
Ken Timmerman’s latest work of non-fiction, The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War and Intrigue, is available from Post Hill Press. Ken was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.
