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Donald Trump ordered strikes on Nigeria in December 2025 and May 2026 while his advisors weighed action in Mali. These commands hand fresh victories to U.S. Africa Command, a bureaucratic machine once rumored for dismantling yet now poised to deepen America's entanglement in the Sahel.
The pattern repeats an ancient error. After the 2001 attacks, the Bush administration launched the Pan-Sahel Initiative and the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership, then erected AFRICOM itself in 2007. None of these instruments halted the insurgencies they claimed to forestall, yet each expanded the permanent administrative reach of the foreign policy apparatus.
Augustine taught in the City of God that earthly powers must distinguish their proper ends from the restless lust for dominion. The present course erases that distinction, converting American arms into instruments of the Technocratic Automaton that feeds on perpetual conflict regardless of the occupant in the White House.
Scripture and the ancient creeds place the sword under the magistrate's duty to defend the household and the commonwealth, not to police distant deserts at the prompting of professional strategists. National sovereignty requires that foreign engagements serve the concrete interests of the American people, not the institutional survival of commands whose budgets grow with every new front.
The Westphalian settlement of 1648 recognized that stable order among nations rests on defined borders and limited external interference. Each new strike in West Africa dissolves that inheritance and binds the next administration to the same logic of escalation.
The Faithful Remnant must therefore reject the false choice between bombastic intervention and supine retreat. They must demand the restoration of constitutional limits that confine military action to genuine threats against the homeland and its people.
Only by recovering the patriarchal and covenantal understanding of authority, ordered first toward the defense of kin and country, can the nation escape the cycle in which every president, however populist his rhetoric, ultimately serves the interests of the permanent war state.
