WASHINGTON: Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday said the US would focus international counterterrorism efforts on “far-left terror,” telling officials from more than 60 countries that leftist violence had been overlooked.
A Washington conference hosted by Rubio has sparked concerns from Democrats that the Trump administration is politicising counterterrorism efforts and draining resources from fighting extremism on other fronts. In a speech, Rubio said the Islamic militancy threat was “severely diminished” due to coordinated international efforts but that rising left-wing violence was a “blind spot”.
“We can and we must identify and map this threat and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it,” Rubio said, citing a transnational threat from groups who hate the West and target its politicians and infrastructure.
The conference marks the Trump administration’s most significant effort yet to internationalize a counterterrorism focus that critics say is not supported by data, raising questions about whether resources will be shifted away from monitoring Islamic militancy and far-right violence.
President Donald Trump has made countering left-wing groups a priority. Trump singled out the antifa movement on the campaign trail in 2024, and vowed to take action against left-wing groups he accuses of fomenting violence after the killing of conservative activist and Trump ally Charlie Kirk last year.
The Trump administration convened a law enforcement workshop in May to discuss the threat of far-left groups and would co-host a second workshop with Germany, Rubio said.
“We will either cooperate across our borders, or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them,” Rubio said. “The United States is building the infrastructure, the partnership and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror.” Since November, Washington has designated four European groups Antifa Ost, the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front, Armed Proletarian Justice and Revolutionary Class Self-Defense as Foreign Terrorist Organisations, offering rewards of up to $10 million for information on their financing.
The US Treasury is expanding probes into the use of charitable and nonprofit structures to hide foreign influence and allow violence, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the conference on Thursday.
Extremists with the admin
Eleven Democratic lawmakers wrote to Rubio on Wednesday questioning the evidence for the new focus on left-wing groups and called the White House’s May counterterrorism strategy, which did not mention neo-Nazi or other far-right groups, a “politically partisan document.” The letter referred to concerns that designating groups as far-left terror organisations risked targeting lawful protests and political opponents.
“We strongly urge the Department to return its focus to a serious mission set that is definitionally apolitical, data-driven, and rooted in reality, instead of rubberstamping the political priorities of extremists within the Administration whose views and policies put US national security and the American people at risk,” wrote the lawmakers.
The lawmakers included Representative Gregory Meeks, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and William Keating, the ranking member of the subcommittee on Europe. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter. At the conference, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said leftists were driven by “envy and hatred” and derided antifa demonstrators as “all deformed in some way, in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism”.
Published in Dawn, July 17th, 2026