Lekan Olayiwola
The global order is hardening in ways that matter for how power is exercised and how external influences intersect with domestic risk. Many of the assumptions that guided middle and regional powers for much of the past two decades are quietly being revised. This shift reveals itself through patterns that appear discrete, even idiosyncratic, but together signal a deeper recalibration in how influence is asserted and defended.
Recent developments involving the United States’ posture towards Venezuela, renewed assertions around Greenland’s strategic value, diplomatic strain with South Africa, intensified pressure on China and Russia, and a more focused attention on strategically positioned states across Africa are often treated as isolated episodes or personalised to individual leaders. That framing misses the larger point.
Nigeria at the nexus of strategic recalibration
What is emerging is a fragmenting US led geopolitical order in which rules remain invoked, but selectively applied; in which multilateralism persists, but increasingly as cover rather than constraint; and in which leverage is exercised more openly across energy, finance, security, and narrative space.
For Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, a regional anchor, and a state approaching another pivotal electoral cycle, this moment introduces strategic risks that are subtle, cumulative, and easily misunderstood. This is not a story of imminent confrontation or external orchestration. It is a reassessment of exposure.
From cooperative leadership to transactional power
For much of the post–Cold War period, US leadership operated through cooperative frameworks, institutional mediation, and a degree of predictability that allowed regional powers to plan around relatively stable assumptions. That posture is giving way to something more transactional. Across recent US foreign-policy decisions, an emerging pattern is a willingness to privilege direct strategic advantage over cooperative leadership, flexibility over restraint, and bilateral leverage over consensus-driven process.
Moves around Venezuelan oil once heavily sanctioned, now selectively re-engaged demonstrate how quickly principle yields to strategic need. Renewed rhetoric around Greenland reflects a blunt recognition of geography, resources, and Arctic positioning. Diplomatic distancing from South Africa signals lower tolerance for ambiguity among partners perceived as drifting.
None of this is anomalous. It reflects a broader recalibration driven by domestic pressures, energy insecurity, industrial competition, and intensifying rivalry with China and Russia. The significance lies less in any single decision than in the normalisation of a precedent that exceptional measures are justified by strategic urgency, and that international restraint is conditional, not assumed.
Nigeria in a fragmented multipolar order
Multipolarity, once an approaching condition, is now an operational reality; but in a form far less orderly than the term suggests. What is emerging is not a balanced concert of powers, but a fragmented landscape in which influence is unevenly distributed, rules are enforced asymmetrically, and alignment is increasingly issue-specific.
China’s economic reach in Nigeria is deep and visible, spanning infrastructure, trade, technology, and finance. Yet domestic unease over debt exposure, labour practices, local value capture, and industrial dependency has grown steadily.
Russia’s economic footprint remains modest by comparison, but its interest in defence cooperation, security diplomacy, and symbolic alignment persists, particularly as it seeks partners outside Western pressure regimes. Western engagement continues to emphasise stability, counter-terrorism, and reform, but increasingly through narrower channels, reduced aid budgets, and more explicit conditionalities. Nigeria is not being courted because it is weak, but because it is strategically consequential.
Strategic importance as exposure
Nigeria’s scale gives it leverage, but it also magnifies scrutiny. Its demography shapes migration calculations. Its energy profile intersects awkwardly with global transition politics. Its geographic position and military weight matter in a region destabilised by Sahelian coups, jihadist expansion, and declining European influence.
This strategic importance creates expectations. Regional stabilisation roles are assumed. Security cooperation intensifies. Diplomatic silence is interpreted. Policy choices once treated as domestic reforms are read through geopolitical lenses. The result is not pressure applied openly, but exposure that accumulates quietly.
Security cooperation and the risk of dependency
Counter-terrorism partnerships, intelligence sharing, and military assistance have delivered tactical benefits. Yet without sustained investment in indigenous surveillance, logistics, command structures, and defence production, such cooperation risks sliding from partnership into dependency.
When threat perception, intelligence priorities, and operational tempo are shaped externally, strategic autonomy narrows even as immediate risks are managed. Security becomes stabilising in the short term but constraining over time.
Economic vulnerability in a transactional era
Economic exposure compounds this vulnerability. Nigeria’s reliance on oil exports, foreign exchange inflows, and external financing leaves it sensitive to shifts in global energy politics, sanctions regimes, and financial signalling.
As development finance becomes more transactional and debt restructuring increasingly intersects with geopolitical alignment, economic policy space tightens. Choices presented as technocratic including subsidy reform, currency management, and fiscal consolidation now carry strategic meaning beyond Nigeria’s borders.
Sovereignty today is rarely tested through overt interference. It is tested through incentives. Infrastructure finance, security assistance, trade concessions, and investment pledges respond to real needs, yet they also shape policy horizons. When available options are structured externally, autonomy erodes quietly. Sovereignty is not lost by imposition, but by constrained choice.
Elections as a strategic pressure point
As Nigeria approaches the 2027 elections, these dynamics intensify. In a context of economic strain and social pressure, external actors offering capital inflows, security guarantees, or reputational endorsement can shape political narratives without appearing to intervene. Elections in a hardening global climate become pressure points rather than flashpoints. Structural influence works without orchestration.
Nigeria does not need dramatic realignment or rhetorical defiance. It needs intentional strategy. Security partnerships must deepen domestic capability rather than substitute for it. Economic diplomacy must prioritise value capture, not just aggregate inflows. Non-alignment must be active, negotiated, and strategic, not passive.
Nigeria must also recognise that influence will increasingly flow through softer channels like information ecosystems, consultancy networks, diaspora capital, regulatory standards, and digital platforms.
Strategic clarity in a fragmenting order
The current geopolitical moment is not uniquely hostile, but it is less forgiving of ambiguity. Great powers are acting more openly in pursuit of interest. Middle powers are being drawn into these dynamics whether they choose to be or not. Nigeria’s challenge is not choosing sides in a renewed great-power struggle. It is avoiding being compressed by struggles defined elsewhere.
In a fragmenting US-led geopolitical order, sovereignty is preserved not by declarations, but by capacity, foresight, and disciplined choice. That work is quiet, incremental, and often invisible, but it is precisely what determines whether Nigeria remains a rule-taker or secures its place as a consequential actor on its own terms.
•Olayiwola is a peace & conflict researcher/policy analyst. He can be reached at lekanolayiwola@gmail.com
