Rubio Built a Global Coalition Against an Enemy He Won't Define

The Loy Henderson conference room at the State Department filled up on Thursday with delegations from more than 60 countries, seated in a semicircle for what the administration called the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, told the room that counterterrorism doctrine has had a "blind spot"² for violence from the political left, promised more terrorist designations beyond the four European groups listed in November, and announced a new visa restriction policy³ targeting members of far-left terrorist and other aligned groups. "It is time to crush this evil forever," he said⁴.

I spent the past two days reading the designation notices, the summit fact sheet, and the visa policy, trying to answer the question the event itself kept dodging: what, operationally, counts as far-left terrorism? The answer I keep arriving at is that the definition has two layers. There is a small, verifiable core of violent cells in Europe and the United States, every one of which existing criminal law has already reached. And there is a perimeter, drawn in terms like aligned groups and "economic sabotage," that no one in the administration has defined and that is doing most of the work. The perimeter, I have concluded, is the point.

Start with the core, because it is real and deserves to be described honestly. The four groups the State Department designated in November⁶ as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations have documented violent histories. Germany's Antifa Ost, the so-called Hammer Gang, attacked people it deemed fascists between 2018 and 2023, including a spree in Budapest that got it added to Hungary's terror list. The two Greek groups claimed IED attacks¹¹ on riot-police headquarters, the Ministry of Labor, and Hellenic Train offices. In the United States, a CSIS analysis⁷ of 750 incidents over three decades found left-wing attacks and plots rising from an average of 0.6 per year in the 1990s to about four per year since 2016, with 2025 marking the first year in more than 30 that left-wing incidents outnumbered right-wing ones. Most of the deadliest left-wing attacks were ambushes of police officers. None of that is invented.

The administration's defenders would add, fairly, that counterterrorism law does not wait for body counts. Foreign Terrorist Organization designation, the State Department's mechanism for freezing a group's assets and criminalizing "material support" to it, has always been a preemptive tool, aimed at financing and logistics before an attack rather than after. And Europe's numbers give the internationalization argument its best footing: the State Department's summit fact sheet⁵ counts 21 EU attacks attributed to far-left and anarchist actors in 2024, nearly matching the 24 jihadist attacks that year, many aimed at rail networks and infrastructure. If the question were whether specific violent anarchist cells exist and merit disruption, the answer would be yes.

But that is not the question the summit was built around, and the administration's own evidence shows it. The same CSIS dataset the White House has leaned on found that left-wing attacks killed 13 people in the past decade against 112 killed by right-wing attackers and 82 by jihadists, that the rise comes from "very low levels," and that the 2025 crossover owes much to a collapse in right-wing incidents, of which CSIS counted exactly one in the first half of 2025. Terrorism researchers have criticized even the report's modest claims⁸ as resting on too few cases; as one put it, "Five is a really low case number to try to make any kind of inference from." Asked at the summit whether right-wing violence would get its own ministerial, a State Department official answered¹, "We go where the threat is." By the measure that has governed counterterrorism prioritization for two decades, lethality, the threat is demonstrably somewhere else.

Even the core wobbles under inspection. An FTO must be a foreign organization that threatens U.S. nationals or U.S. security interests. Yet Just Security's review⁹ of the November designations found the State Department attributed no attack to Antifa Ost since February 2023, that Germany's Interior Ministry says the group's capacity for violence has "decreased significantly" after arrests, and that Washington reportedly never coordinated the designation with Berlin. Only one of the four groups even brands itself as antifa; the Italian FAI/FRI predates the American antifa movement entirely. The designations read less like a threat assessment than like a curation exercise: find four prosecutable European cells, label them all Antifa, and use them to validate a category that domestic law cannot support. President Trump's September 2025 executive order declaring antifa a domestic terrorist organization has no statutory mechanism behind it¹², because no domestic designation authority exists and because antifa in the United States is a decentralized tendency, not a membership organization with funds to freeze.

Which brings me to the perimeter. The visa policy announced Thursday does not confine itself to the four designated groups or to people who committed violence. It reaches members of aligned groups who supported or incited terrorism, backed violent criminal activity, took part in "economic sabotage," financed or recruited for violent actions, or facilitated the convergence of far-left networks. The State Department did not define aligned, did not define convergence, and did not say what conduct counts as economic sabotage. This vagueness is not incidental, because the underlying directive, National Security Presidential Memorandum-7, defines the movement it targets partly by beliefs: Arnold & Porter's analysis¹⁰ notes that it lists anti-Americanism, opposition to capitalism, anti-Christian views, and extremism on migration, race, and gender among the indicators, and warns that nonprofits doing joint protests or mutual aid with an entity later deemed Antifa-affiliated could face material-support exposure, civil forfeiture, and bank de-risking. A terrorism definition that incorporates ideology is a terrorism definition that can absorb whatever the ideology's nonviolent adherents do.

Now multiply that elasticity by 60 governments. Rubio explicitly framed the ministerial as the start of coordinated intelligence sharing, law enforcement cooperation, and financial disruption, modeled on the post-9/11 apparatus. The delegations were mostly European and Latin American, and plenty of the governments represented have labor, environmental, or anti-austerity protest movements they would be glad to process through a counterterrorism channel blessed by Washington. The global war on terror's central lesson was that tools built for al-Qaeda migrated, within years, to journalists, dissidents, and NGOs in every country that adopted the vocabulary. That migration did not require bad faith everywhere. It required only a vague category and an incentive to use it.

To believe this campaign stays narrow, you have to believe that an administration which wrote anti-capitalism into its indicators of terrorism will nonetheless confine enforcement to hammer gangs and letter-bombers, and that visa officers handed undefined terms like economic sabotage will decline to apply them to protest organizers. I do not believe either. The proof will come with the first enforcement actions: if the people denied entry under Thursday's policy turn out to be financiers of Greek bomb cells, I will happily revise. If they turn out to be activists, fundraisers, or journalists deemed aligned with an enemy the government still refuses to define, the summit will have accomplished exactly what it was designed to do.