By Fr. OKHUELEIGBE OSEMHANTIE ÃMOS

That the United States’ use of force in Sokoto, Nigeria, is no longer breaking news does not diminish its ethical gravity. Moral reflection, especially within Catholic tradition, often demands temporal distance from events, for it is only when urgency recedes that prudence can speak clearly. Catholic moral theology, drawing from St. Augustine and later developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, does not restrict its scrutiny to formally declared wars alone; it extends with equal seriousness to limited military actions, counterterrorism strikes, and other calibrated uses of force. The ethical question, therefore, is not whether Sokoto represents a “war,” but whether the resort to force itself conforms to enduring moral norms (Augustine, City of God, XIX.7).

U.S. strike, undertaken with the consent of Nigerian government and justified as a defensive action against extremist elements allegedly affiliated with the Islamic State, was framed as a proportionate response to a transnational security threat (Reuters, 2025). Within the Augustinian moral universe, the starting point is just cause. Augustine permits the use of force only to confront grave injustice or to prevent serious harm to the innocent (Contra Faustum, XXII.75). If the intelligence underpinning the Sokoto strike accurately identified an imminent and organised threat capable of mass violence, then the moral threshold of just cause may plausibly be met. Similar reasoning has been invoked in other limited-force operations, such as U.S. drone strikes against Al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan after 2001, where the stated objective was the prevention of further attacks rather than territorial conquest.

At the same time, Catholic ethics insists that just cause is inseparable from epistemic responsibility. Moral permission to use force presupposes not only danger but moral certainty regarding the identity, capacity, and immediacy of the threat. In environments like north-western Nigeria, where criminal banditry, insurgency, and ideological extremism frequently overlap, the risk of analytical compression is real. Past interventions, notably the 2011 NATO operation in Libya, demonstrate how initial claims of civilian protection can be undermined when threat assessments are partial or politically filtered, leading to long-term instability that outweighs short-term security gains (Bellamy, 2011). The Sokoto strike must therefore be judged not only by intent but by the reliability of the intelligence that informed it.

Legitimate authority, a core Augustinian criterion, appears formally satisfied in this instance. Nigerian governmental approval aligns the action with both international law and Catholic moral teaching, which affirms that force must be exercised by duly constituted authorities acting for the common good (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II–II, q.40, a.1; Catechism of the Catholic Church [CCC], 2309). In this respect, the strike in Sokoto differs ethically from unilateral interventions lacking host-state consent. Nevertheless, Catholic ethics probes beyond legality into moral agency. Authority entails responsibility, and repeated reliance on external military assistance, as seen in France’s long engagement in Mali, raises questions about subsidiarity, institutional capacity, and the danger of normalising foreign force as a default security solution.

Right intention remains the most interior and demanding criterion. Augustine is unequivocal: force is morally tolerable only when ordered toward peace, not vengeance, domination, or symbolic display (City of God, XIX.12). The public framing of Sokoto strike combined security language with civilisational and religious undertones, a rhetorical pattern also observable in earlier counterterror campaigns in Iraq and Syria. While such narratives may mobilise political support, Catholic ethics warns that they risk contaminating intention by introducing motives extrinsic to peace itself (Francis, 2020). Conversely, it must also be acknowledged that states under persistent threat often communicate in simplified moral registers, not necessarily to inflame conflict but to reassure vulnerable populations. Ethical judgment here requires restraint: neither cynically imputing bad faith nor naively assuming purity of motive.

The probability of success, understood in Catholic moral theology, cannot be reduced to tactical effectiveness alone. Precision strikes that eliminate specific targets may succeed militarily, as did certain targeted operations against Boko Haram commanders in the Lake Chad region. Yet the Church consistently teaches that lasting peace requires more than coercive containment; it demands justice, development, and social repair (Benedict XVI, 2009). Where force is not integrated into a broader strategy addressing structural violence, its moral success remains provisional. Augustine’s warning is instructive: order imposed without justice merely rearranges conflict rather than resolving it (City of God, IV.4).

Proportionality, often invoked through casualty statistics, must be interpreted holistically. Reports indicating no civilian deaths in Sokoto suggest commendable operational restraint, consistent with the Church’s insistence on discrimination and the protection of noncombatants (CCC, 2312–2314). In this respect, the strike compares favourably with earlier interventions, such as Kenya’s cross-border operations in Somalia, where civilian harm significantly eroded moral credibility. Yet proportionality also encompasses psychological disruption, communal fear, and the long-term precedent set by external military involvement. Even limited force can generate moral costs that are not immediately visible but remain ethically relevant.

The principle of last resort introduces necessary humility into moral judgment. Augustine permits force only when peaceful alternatives have been seriously attempted and found insufficient (Epistle 189). In Nigeria’s prolonged security crisis, efforts at policing reform, intelligence coordination, deradicalisation, and economic intervention have produced uneven results. It is therefore plausible, though not conclusively demonstrable, that policymakers judged force to be necessary at this juncture. Catholic ethics does not demand certainty of exhaustion, but it does require that force never become a substitute for patient, nonviolent statecraft.

To conclude, Catholic ethical evaluation of U.S. use of force in Sokoto yields a deliberately balanced judgment. The action demonstrates elements of moral seriousness,.host-state consent, operational restraint, and an articulated protective aim,.while also revealing unresolved ethical tensions concerning intelligence certainty, intention, proportionality in its wider sense, and the adequacy of nonviolent alternatives. Augustine’s wisdom remains apt: force may at times be permitted, but it is never morally indifferent. For Catholic ethics, the decisive question is not whether force succeeds, but whether it genuinely serves justice, protects human dignity, and contributes, however modestly, to the hard labour of peace.

•Fr. Okhueleigbe Osemhantie Amos, PhD, is of the Catholic Institute of West Africa (CIWA), Port Harcourt, Nigeria.