Frontiers of Need

American Humanitarianism and the Nigerian Civil War

Frontiers of Need argues that the Nigerian Civil War marked a turning point in US foreign policy, bringing humanitarian intervention into the center of debates about US engagement with the world. Emerging at a moment when Americans were already questioning the moral foundations of Cold War foreign policy, Biafra became a mirror reflecting a broader crisis of morality – a sense that the United States had lost its ethical bearings in the world. The mass starvation of Biafran children did not merely present a humanitarian catastrophe but, through a US-led humanitarian intervention, offered a chance to overcome moral paralysis and chart a different role for the United States abroad.

Drawing from governmental archives and organizational records across the United States, Britain, and Nigeria, Brian McNeil analyzes how domestic pressure for humanitarian action forced the Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon administrations to intervene in Biafra. Yet both administrations treated humanitarian intervention more as a domestic political problem than as a moral imperative, pursuing relief initiatives that managed American dissent without meaningfully addressing Biafran suffering. Through detailed examination of failed negotiations, bureaucratic conflicts, and competing sovereignty claims, Frontiers of Need reveals how efforts to wed humanitarian intervention with American power ultimately prolonged the conflict while failing to deliver the moral renewal Americans sought, establishing instead a troubling precedent for how humanitarian concern could become entangled with national interest in contemporary international politics.

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