By Simon Lewis
WASHINGTON, July 16 (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told officials from more than 60 countries on Thursday that the United States would seek to refocus international counterterrorism efforts on what he called “far-left terror”, arguing that left-wing violence had long been overlooked.
The conference in Washington has sparked Democratic concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing counterterrorism efforts and diverting resources from other extremist threats.
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.
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.
Latvia’s Foreign Minister Baiba Braze told Reuters on the sidelines of the conference that the forum also allowed countries like hers to discuss threats from Russia-backed groups and new trends in technology use by militants of all stripes.
“What is new is that it’s very much a fluid extremist environment where technology enables various actors to radicalize different groups. Sometimes it’s leftist ideology, sometimes it’s very right-wing ideology,” Braze said.
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 Organizations, offering rewards of up to $10 million for information on their financing. Rubio said there would be more designations soon.
Rubio announced a new visa restriction policy that would target members of groups “who have supported or incited” violence or economic sabotage, but did not say whether any visa bans had been issued under the policy.
The U.S. 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 WITHIN THE ADMINISTRATION’
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, obtained by Reuters, referred to concerns that designating groups as far-left terror organizations 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 U.S. 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”.
“Why is there not one normal-looking person among them? Every one of them, through the course of their life and their decisions, has scarred their body and their appearance in many different ways to the point in which their outer appearance becomes a manifestation of their inner hatred,” Miller said.
Rubio in his speech cited property damage and looting during demonstrations after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd as an example of left-wing violence that had been ignored, arguing that think tanks and journalists often agree with the goals of left-wing militants.
Rubio also said left-wing groups work with foreign states hostile to the U.S., citing Iranian proxy networks as “increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world,” though he did not provide evidence of such links. He also accused Cuba’s Communist leaders of having “helped build the far left” in the United States, without offering evidence to support the claim.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis, editing by Deepa Babington and Sanjeev Miglani)
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