On the 1st of November 2025, President Donald Trump released a statement about the situation facing Christians in Nigeria. He warned that if the Nigerian government failed to protect Christian communities from rising violence, the US might be “forced to step in” to defend them. The tone was characteristically Trumpian - dramatic, blunt, and escalatory - but it touched on a very real issue.
According to Open Doors, of the roughly five thousand Christians killed worldwide each year for their faith, more than four thousand are Nigerian.
Trump’s remark also came only months after a major structural shift in US foreign assistance: the closure of USAID’s global mission network, which had big effects on Nigeria.
It was between these two developments that the Danube Institute sent a small team of researchers to the country, in June and July.
Our purpose was to investigate the condition of Christian communities firsthand and to explore what a post-liberal development-aid framework might look like in practice.
We approached the question with one notable precedent in mind: Hungary Helps, the Hungarian government’s development agency, which explicitly supports persecuted Christians and other vulnerable minorities worldwide.
In an interesting twist of timing, our paper on the trip was published the same week as Trump’s statement, and we now know that a copy of the report has already been hand-delivered to the US Vice President, J. D. Vance.
Calum Nicholson, who was on that trip, is joined by his fellow lead authors, Nicholas Naquin and Daniel Farkas, to discuss the findings of that research: the realities on the ground, the broader geopolitical context, and what a more honest and effective model of international assistance might require.