By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, December 29, 2025
If you want to begin to understand the conflict in
Nigeria into which the Trump administration has
just inserted the United States and its military, consult the most famous
passages of Mancur Olson, the 20th-century economist who described
the original architect of the state—pretty much every state—as a “stationary
bandit.” In the grim Hobbesian condition of bellum omnium contra omnes,
you have your basic Mad Max-style gangs of roving pillagers go from
place to place demonstrating the results of might-makes-right political
thinking until, through trial and error, one of them makes a discovery about
efficient banditry in the long term: It takes a village! And if you pillage a
village to utter annihilation, then there will be no crops to steal next spring
and no more gold or cattle or maidens or whatever to be offered up as tribute
next time around. So your thinking-type bandit chief will spare just enough to
enable the villagers to recover and plant new crops and produce new goods to
plunder in the future. The bandit basically goes from being a hunter to being a
rancher.
But that creates a problem, too: What about all those
other, less-enlightened bandits out there? They are sure to come in behind the
more thoughtful pillagers and steal and burn and plunder the leftovers, so the
enlightened bandit chief decides to leave behind a little protective garrison
to ward off other bandits. Now the bandit is explicitly invested in the welfare
of his victims. Leave that arrangement in place for a century or two and it
acquires a patina of respectability as bandits become dukes and kings and
presidents while pillage and tribute become taxes.
The end state is, from a certain cranky libertarian point
of view, the same god—mned thing, which you can see for yourself if you decide
to stop paying your taxes and see how long it takes Uncle Sam or the local
yokels to forcibly seize your goods at gunpoint. Except the bandits don’t go
roving abroad very much anymore: They have become stationary bandits, i.e.,
kingdoms, fiefdoms, duchies, or … states. Republics and democracies are,
to indulge that cranky libertarian point of view, partly a way of making the
bandits mind their manners a little bit, through formalizing what are in effect
instruments of self-defense. But (the cranky libertarian holds) these forms of
government are mainly a way of making ourselves feel better about being reduced
to the state of livestock that is milked, shorn, and occasionally butchered by
our owners, because it is happening “legitimately,” with our consent. Never
mind that what we originally “consented” to was being pillaged half to
death rather than all the way.
Lakurawa, the insurgents the U.S. military (authorized by
… oh, something!) supposedly intended to attack in Nigeria—it is not
clear that there were any Lakurawa in the area targeted—are bandits who
aspire to stationary status. But they aren’t yet stationary enough, apparently!
A day after part
of a missile fired by the United States hit their village, landing just meters
from its only medical facility, the people of Jabo in northwestern Nigeria are
in a state of shock and confusion.
Suleiman Kagara, a
resident of this quiet and predominantly Muslim farming community in Tambuwal
district of Sokoto state, told CNN he heard a loud blast and saw flames as a
projectile flew overhead at around 10 p.m. on Thursday.
Soon after, it
came crashing down, exploding on impact with the ground and sending the
villagers fleeing in fear.
…
While parts of
Sokoto face challenges with banditry, kidnappings and attacks by armed groups
including Lakurawa—which Nigeria classifies as a terrorist organization due to
suspected affiliations with Islamic State—villagers say Jabo is not known for
terrorist activity and that local Christians coexist peacefully with the Muslim
majority.
…
Bashar Isah Jabo,
a lawmaker representing Tambuwal in the state parliament, described the village
to CNN as “a peaceful community” that has “no known history of ISIS, Lakurawa,
or any other terrorist groups operating in the area.”
He said the
projectile had struck a field “approximately 500 meters” from a Primary Health
Center in Jabo and that, while there were no casualties, the incident had
“caused fear and panic within the community.”
Some of you are having flashbacks to the Clinton
administration’s 1998 bombing of a civilian (and, in part, veterinary)
pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. (“American officials have acknowledged over
the years that the evidence that prompted President Clinton to order the
missile strike on the Shifa plant was not as solid as first portrayed,” the New
York Times reported
in 2005. “Indeed, officials later said that there was no proof that the plant
had been manufacturing or storing nerve gas, as initially suspected by the
Americans, or had been linked to Osama bin Laden, who was a resident of
Khartoum in the [1980s].”) American presidents too often adhere to an unstated
maxim: DON’T JUST STAND THERE—BOMB SOMETHING!
Parts of Nigeria are quite lawless and apparently
ungovernable (at least by the ladies and gentlemen in Abuja), and Lakurawa
fighters have at times ingratiated themselves with the locals by, as Olson
would have predicted, clearing out bandits—bandits not associated with Lakurawa
or its loosely organized set of allies. Like terrorist groups such as Boko
Haram (with which Lakurawa reportedly
has a relationship) or certain white-power prison gangs (or antifa, a theme
to which I will return below), Lakurawa (meaning “the recruits,” a Hausa
adaptation of the French les recrues) is not a tightly organized
hierarchy or, as far as outside observers can tell, an organization with a
clearly defined membership or specific shared goals.
What the organization is not, as both the Nigerian
government and Nigerian
Christian leaders insist, is a traditional ideological Islamist
organization persecuting Christians or engaged in a anti-Christian genocide. It
is, rather, a hybrid terrorist-criminal group. Most of its victims (who are
subjected to “taxes”) are Muslim, because most of the local population is
Muslim. Lakurawa does not target Muslims and Christians because they are
Muslims and Christians but because they are there and because they have
something worth stealing (“taxing”), in much the same way that the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) largely targeted Catholics with
its “taxes” not because of anti-Catholic sentiment but because it operated in
Colombia, which was almost entirely Catholic at the apex of FARC’s predations.
That Lakurawa is a terrorist organization is not much contested; that it is an
Islamic State affiliate waging war against Nigerian Christians is, for the most
part, unsupported
hogwash, to paraphrase the Institute for Security Studies:
Some analysts have
speculated that the group affiliates with the IS, either through the ISSP or
Islamic State West Africa Province, but there is no evidence for this. There
are no traces of traditional bay’a ceremonies or allegiance pledge,
through which groups assert their association with larger entities, such as
al-Qaeda or the IS. Furthermore, these global terror networks communicate
intensely about their achievements and those of their affiliates, whereas IS
propaganda channels have never broadcast Lakurawa’s attacks.
Like Boko Haram (boko from the English books,
boko haram meaning, roughly, education is forbidden), Lakurawa seems
to represent a confluence of vague slogans, mutual criminal interests, and a
complex network of social relationships and attitudes—in which sense it is very
much like a traditional criminal gang, although it obviously differs from such gangs
in important ways. Stationary bandits and bandits aspiring to stationary status
exist across a spectrum of establishment and respectability.
The Taliban, for example, was for many years as much a
narcotics syndicate as it was a coalition of religious and tribal factions, and
it evolved as it took on formal stately functions. The current president of
Syria, an
actual jihadist recently feted in the White House by President Donald
Trump, was previously the leader of an important al-Qaeda faction and continues
to maintain many jihadist connections. What we came to know as “the mafia” at
times simply was municipal government in certain parts of Sicily,
providing arbitration and physical security while also acting as a kind of
Catholic mutaween, policing public morality. King John of England was,
if the complaints of his barons are to be believed, a lot less like King Arthur
and a lot more like Saddam Hussein. Olson was onto something with that
“stationary bandit” stuff.
If you’ll forgive the abrupt turn, it is probably worth
noting here that this has no obvious connection to the national security or
national interest of the United States of America.
President Trump, having found little opposition to his entirely
lawless campaign of mass-murder theater in the Caribbean, has now entered
the United States into an illegal—because unauthorized—war in Nigeria. Trump
insists that Lakurawa is a proxy of the Islamic State and that it is engaged in
the persecution of Nigerian Christians. While such
claims are widely
cited, there is little well-documented evidence for either of these
assertions. And while the current “authorization for the use of military force”
dating to the post-9/11 era is very broad and very much in need of repealing,
there is nothing in it that could plausibly be interpreted to empower the U.S.
president to wage a unilateral military campaign against local bandits in the
backwaters of Nigeria. But there isn’t anything in the law empowering the
president to
slaughter seafaring Venezuelans or to
deport U.S. citizens or to engage in any number of his current initiatives,
which range from the imbecilic to the positively criminal. Mike Johnson, John
Thune, and such fair-weather friends of the Constitution as Sen. Ted Cruz roll
over and present their bellies, hoping for a scratch, while Democrats howl
impotently.
Donald Trump is no kind of Christian—he is a toxic blend
of atheist and idolator—but he knows that those in the pews are his most
unshakeable supporters and that he is going to need all of the support he can
get as his failure to deliver on his absurd economic promises becomes a more
painful and undeniable fact of everyday life for millions of Americans watching
the national debt skyrocket even faster than their grocery bills. Trump wants
to pose as a crusader, coming to the aid of persecuted Christians—but only when
doing so is a very low-cost proposition. It is not clear that the abuse of
Christians in Nigeria is anything more than incidental to the general banditry
and oppression of Lakurawa et al.—it takes too credulous a view of the fig leaf
of “zakat” covering ordinary robbery—but there are places in the world where
the active, brutal, ruthless repression of Christians is a real thing: In the
so-called People’s
Republic of China, for example—but Trump is far too low a coward to try to
do anything about that, in much that same way the Russian shadow fleet is
permitted to flout U.S. sanctions while Venezuelan boats are blown out of the
water on unsupported drug-war pretexts that would not render the attacks any
less illegal or immoral even if they were true. It is not the case that all
bullies are cowards, but many bullies are cowards, and Trump is one of those,
as are many of the men and women who serve him.
The jihadi-mafia hybrid terrorism of Lakurawa and allied
groups is potentially destabilizing and is transnational in character. Nigeria
is a strategically important country (it is Africa’s most populous country, one
of its largest economies, Africa’s largest
oil producer, etc.), and there may be a case for U.S. intervention there
aimed at fortifying its stability. If the Trump administration would like to
try to make such a case to Congress—which still retains the power to declare
wars, a power not constitutionally entrusted to the president—then the case
should be made, publicly, and a vote should be held. One can imagine that if,
say, Paul Wolfowitz were asked to make such a case on behalf of President Mitt
Romney, the chorus of those jeering like a troop of neurotic baboons would be
led by supposed anti-interventionists like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump and
their like. Expenditures in pursuit of actual U.S. interests (in Ukraine, for
example) are, to such men and women, contemptible evidence of our national
weakness. Brutal autocracies such as the one administered from Beijing are to
be coddled, while third-rate caudillos such as Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un
are objects of admiration and even friendship. Every time Putin murders a
hospital ward full of expectant mothers, you can count on Donald Trump to
out-Mahatma even Mohandas K. Gandhi himself in speaking of peace. But a
carelessly executed and bloodthirsty crusade on the probably pretextual and
certainly exaggerated assertion that the victims of ordinary banditry, terrible
as their situation is, are Christian martyrs threatened by scary-looking,
fez-wearing, black Muslims? Sign the Trumpkins up for that.
And Furthermore ...
In search of a metaphor to describe our political period,
I have settled on epilepsy as a useful one. (I ask the indulgence of
non-metaphorical sufferers of that disease. As the ghost of Susan Sontag can
attest, illness as metaphor has its limits. “I guess her cancer wasn’t
metaphorical after all. Sorry.”) In particular, I think of American
democracy as being in its grand
mal era, marked by “sudden
loss of consciousness” followed by violent spasms that often result in the
victim’s soiling himself. That really does kind of capture the mood, doesn’t
it?
There are a few of us working on projects of
center-left/center-right cooperation in support of the fundamentals: the rule
of law, democracy, free speech, etc. It is slow going, and annoying. One reason
for this is stupidity. I don’t intend to do a “one for you, one for you” thing
like I’m handing out cookies to my toddlers, but the gobsmacking imbecility of
the populist right is at least matched by the stupidity of the bedwetting left,
a fact of which I am reminded during my daily reading of progressive-leaning
opinion. (I do not need to read very much right-wing opinion.) You can read the
toddler-level droppings of, e.g., Mike
Lofgren writing in Salon, where he savages conservative Trump critic
George Will for being … a conservative Trump critic, one who remains
committed to that “conservative sensibility” that Will writes about, meaning
the controversial idea that the political wisdom of conservatism is in working
to conserve the founding ideals of the United States against reckless
innovation and irresponsible novelty.
You can read stuff so dumb and dishonest that I will not
link to it insisting “SCOTUSblog Falls Into the MAGA Orbit,” because it has
been acquired by … us, Dispatch Media, where you can get the latest from
the author of The
Case Against Trump and “Witless
Ape Rides Escalator,” from Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes, from Nick
Catoggio, from podcast regular David French, from Megan McArdle, and other such
non-obvious personifications of the MAGA tendency.
You can also read such sentences as this:
Those on the
far-right believe that antifa is a terrorist organization, when being
anti-fascist is literally one of the reasons why we fought Nazi Germany during
World War II.
That sentence, from Brian
Karem, also writing in Salon, is surely the work of someone who has
never heard of the Baader–Meinhof Gang or Shining Path or other similar
terrorist organizations supposedly committed to an antifascist agenda, as
though simply declaring oneself “antifascist” were the beginning and end of the
thing. Vladimir Putin says that his war against Ukraine is an anti-Nazi
campaign, which, if we were to take seriously the mode of analysis offered by
such a numpty (I’m thinking of adding a “Numpty of the Week” section) as Karem,
would put the Russian rape and pillage of Ukraine on the same moral footing as
the Normandy invasion.
If our friends on the left were serious in their
insistence that the United States is in a condition of national crisis—and I
believe that it is—then they would take a more serious and responsible approach
toward the project of working with those who believe Trump and Trumpism to be
an assault upon our national institutions and values (with the occasional
failed coup d’état in the mix to really drive home the point) than they
are.
But rather than rising to the occasion, we get another
variation of the grand mal political seizure—spasms, loss of
consciousness, and the predictable mess that needs cleaning up.
Economics for English Majors
Part of the mess that is going to need cleaning up is, of
course, the national debt, which continues to grow dangerously under the fiscal
incontinence of Donald Trump and Trump-aligned Republicans in Congress. The
absolute size of the debt—currently pushing $40 trillion—is
one metric to watch.
Another relevant metric is the size of debt relative to
GDP (currently pushing
120 percent), which helps give you an idea of the load-bearing capacity of
the United States when it comes to public debt.
Yet another useful metric is the growth of the debt
relative to the growth of the economy—useful but too alluring for those who are
vulnerable to the politics of wishful thinking, people like my friend Larry
Kudlow who argue that if we could just get growth high enough then we
wouldn’t have to worry very much about the deficit, which is true as a matter
of math but irrelevant as a matter of history and current economic conditions.
For the past 20 years, average real GDP growth has been less than 3 percent,
while average deficits have run closer to 4 percent
of GDP. Other than the significant reduction in debt as a share of GDP in
the late 1990s (from 64
percent to 54 percent) the trend has been ever-upward under many different
presidents and Congresses and economic policies: Debt as a share of GDP is about three times today
what it was when Lyndon Johnson was president—a much larger share of a much,
much larger economy.
Another metric: maturity of debt. We sell 30-year bonds,
but the average
maturity of U.S. debt is less than six years—meaning that most of our debt
is due to be paid or refinanced every 71 months. That relatively short maturity
schedule means that our national finances are relatively exposed to sudden
changes in interest rates. We don’t have our debt locked down for 20 years or
30 years. And that matters because of …
… who holds the debt. For most of our history, U.S.
government debt was held by other governments, by central banks and big public
institutions of that kind, which held U.S. debt for reasons that were not
primarily profit-driven. As Geng Ngarmboonanant reports in this eye-opening
New York Times column, that has changed radically in recent years,
with private actors—hedge funds and the like—emerging as the largest buyers of
U.S. government debt. The Bank of Japan (Japanese institutions—not the
Chinese—are the
largest overseas holders of U.S. debt) probably isn’t going to suddenly
dump its holdings of U.S. debt in response to a change in market conditions.
But a profit-seeking investor might—moving quickly in response to changing
conditions is, after all, what successful investors do.
The Treasury
market is now more exposed to profit-driven market forces than before, and the
country has high amounts of debt, making upswings in interest rates and changes
in other borrowing terms very costly. As we sustain and potentially increase
our extraordinary deficits, the return of the private sector into our debt
markets will most likely result in higher interest rates, as private investors
demand greater compensation for holding U.S. debt than their policy-driven
counterparts. Rates will probably be more volatile as well, swinging more
sharply in response to data, policy signals and America’s now chronic political
dysfunction.
U.S. officials are
especially nervous about the growing role of hedge funds, whose highly
leveraged trades can be disrupted by market turbulence and amplify turmoil in
the Treasury market. Over the past four years, hedge funds have doubled their
footprint in the U.S. debt market, making the Cayman Islands—where many hedge
funds are officially based—the place where the most U.S. debt outside the
United States is held, according to the Fed. Typically, people flock to
Treasuries for safety in times of crisis. Yet, driven in large part by hedge
fund activity, the Treasury market went through unusual turbulence during
recent shocks, including the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and
President Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in this past April.
Recently, the
United States has seen investors demanding higher premiums to invest in our
long-term debt—a reflection of growing uncertainty about the country’s economic
and fiscal outlook. According to the most commonly used measure, this premium
currently clocks in at roughly 0.8 percentage points for the all-important
10-year Treasury, a seemingly small number that translates into billions of
dollars in extra interest costs. These costs aren’t felt just by bond traders
on Wall Street or by the government. Higher rates squeeze household pocketbooks
and businesses’ bottom lines. They slow economic growth as new public debt
crowds out private investment.
I suppose that’s good news … if you are a cheap
demagogue. Blaming Wall Street or hedge funds or whatever is going to be a lot
more attractive than blaming the dolts in Congress and the dolts who put them
there.
And Furtherermore ...
Jim Beam will
suspend bourbon production at its main distillery for a year, a result of a
glut in the market due in part to Trump’s idiotic tariffs (which have hurt U.S.
whiskey exports) but also in part to reduced consumer demand for cheap bourbon.
About the latter, I will say: Mea culpa. For many years, I drank all of
the cheap bourbon I could and some pretty good stuff as well, and if I had
thought that the unintended consequences of my recent efforts at
self-improvement would inconvenience the ladies and gentlemen at Suntory so
greatly, I might have tried to organize something to make up for that lost
volume. So, I guess what I’m saying is, I need … about 20 volunteers.
Words About Words
Paul Finkelman, writing
in Slate about Trump’s habit of naming everything in sight after
himself like some bottom-shelf third-world potentate:
Josef Stalin
appeared on numerous stamps while he was the dictator of the Soviet Union and
renamed a major city Stalingrad, after himself.
Stalin named it Stalingrad, after himself, you’re
saying?
What a relief! It would have been weird if he had
named it Stalingrad after someone else. Like if there was a baker named Stalin
who made really, really good pryaniki and the murderous dictator named a
major city after that guy, because of the cookies.
New
York Times headline: “How One Father Created an Organ Empire.” I was
hoping he was going to be a man named Wurlitzer.
In Closing
Assuming the weather cooperates and nobody changes his
mind, I’ll be on The Fifth Column podcast with some old friends on the
episode to be released January 6. I have thoughts about that date! And I’m
looking forward to sharing them.
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