U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has hosted conferences in more than 65 countries focused on far-left political violence, a designation many critics say is used to target legitimate opponents.
The Ministerial Conference on the Resurrection of Political Terrorism on Thursday will bring together representatives of governments from around the world to coordinate on an “emerging threat” that the US State Department calls “a blind spot in the international community’s counterterrorism focus.”
Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, told Reuters that “the far-left terrorist designation could be used to target legitimate protests and political opponents rather than genuine security threats.”
The drivers and participants for the summit are:
What is this summit about?
The Trump administration’s 2026 counterterrorism strategy identifies three major threats: “Islamist terrorism,” “narcoterrorism,” and “violent left-wing extremism, including anarchists and antifascists.”
The strategy states that the third category of left-wing “extremists” has traditionally been ignored, noting that the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025 was carried out “by radicals espousing extreme transgender ideology.”
Counterterrorism strategies have excluded right-wing extremists and white supremacist groups, despite a rise in violence that has blamed some groups, including some of the group that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020, to overturn the U.S. presidential election that Donald Trump lost.
Thomas Leonard, director of the Hague-based International Counterterrorism Center, said the summit reflected a fundamental shift in how the United States views the threat.
“What we’re seeing now in the United States is that counterterrorism has become completely politicized and instrumentalized,” he told Al Jazeera. “For example, the threat of far-right terrorism, considered a major domestic threat for decades, has now completely disappeared from U.S. counterterrorism strategy.”
Who was invited?
Invitations have been sent to more than 70 countries, with the State Department writing on social media that countries have shown “overwhelming interest.” Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar is reported to be attending along with representatives from several countries. The stated purpose is to “expand collaboration, enhance information sharing, and strengthen international law enforcement mechanisms.”
The summit follows a series of smaller meetings held earlier this year, including a meeting with law enforcement officials in The Hague.
Renard said many European countries have expressed concerns about this ministerial meeting by sending relatively junior ministers.
“They’re not particularly convinced that this is an issue that justifies this kind of gathering, but at the same time they don’t want to antagonize the United States. So this is the compromise they’ve found.”
In November 2025, the United States designated four European organizations as terrorist organizations: Germany’s Antifa Ost, Italy’s Unofficial Federation of Anarchists/International Revolutionary Front (FAI/FRI), Greece’s Armed Proletarian Justice, and Greece’s Revolutionary Class Self-Defense Group.
What is “far-left terrorism”?
The term is usually used by governments to refer to movements that are accused of violence and are driven by left-wing ideologies such as Marxism, socialism, and anarchism. Such movements usually describe themselves as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist.
Latin America saw several left-wing armed movements during the Cold War, many of which conducted sustained campaigns of political violence, including Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), El Salvador’s Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMNL), and Uruguay’s Tupamaros. Throughout the 20th century, Washington repeatedly supported hard-line right-wing regimes opposed to left-wing movements throughout Latin America.
India has been grappling with an insurgency by the Naxalites, a far-left Maoist movement that claims to fight for the rural population, starting in the 1960s. The group is considered one of the most serious threats to India’s internal security. At its peak around 2000, thousands of people were killed in conflict with the Naxalite insurgency.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Marxist groups such as West Germany’s Red Army faction claimed to be behind several assassinations, abductions, and bombings aimed at weakening the capitalist state.
In contrast, the Antifa movement, which the Trump administration has consistently sought to portray as a major violent threat, is a loosely decentralized collection of socialist-minded individuals opposed to far-right extremism, white supremacy, and authoritarianism. Several people who prosecutors say are Antifa members have been charged with violence in U.S. courts, particularly in Republican-controlled states such as Texas since President Trump returned to power. In June, eight such individuals were sentenced to several years in prison, and Benjamin Hanil Song, who was convicted of attempted murder of a law enforcement officer, was sentenced to 100 years in prison.
Far-Right Political Violence and Terrorism in the United States
However, the same Trump administration pardoned all those charged with violence during the January 6, 2023 riots, including individuals accused of assaulting police officers.
This week’s summit also focuses specifically on far-left political violence, but like the counterterrorism strategy, far-right ideology and terrorist threats are not included.
This is despite the fact that the Oklahoma bombing, the deadliest terrorist act on American soil, killing 168 people and injuring nearly 700, was carried out by right-wing hardliner Timothy McVeigh.
In February, the Cato Institute, an American think tank based in Washington, D.C., said that of all politically motivated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil from 1975 to 2025, excluding the Oklahoma bombing and 9/11, “45 percent of those killed were committed by right-wing terrorists, 32 percent by Islamists, and 16 percent by left-wing terrorists.”
Renard said the summit is creating the very problems it claims to solve. “With this summit and its strategy, the United States is actually creating a blind spot about the threat of far-right terrorism, because that threat is deeply rooted and entrenched in the United States.”
