“Islamist Extremism” Has Been Defeated; a New (Old) Foe Is Needed: “Left-Wing Political Terrorism”

Every power that aims to establish control needs an enemy commensurate with its aims. The “Islamist Extremism” enemy has served the American Empire well in order to deploy massive surveillance at home and resource control abroad. However, this is a small enemy for the task ahead: the authoritarian drift of Western societies based on a digital control grid and a new geoeconomic reality.

On July 16th, Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism”. It was reported to have been attended by officials from more than 65 countries, although it is not clear which specific nations were represented, and many European governments sent lower-ranking officials. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, was in attendance, while three invited countries refused to send delegates: Brazil, Mexico, and Singapore.

In his address, Marco Rubio praised how “the entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt, from the studs, around a single threat” and how it built a “global coalition” to fight “against Islamist Extremism”. He deemed this effort successful to “a very great extent” and noted that, although the threat has not disappeared, it is now “severely diminished”.

The Secretary of State elaborated further, stating that “the world looks very different today” and that “far-left political terrorism” is worsening: “it can no longer be denied or ignored. Because it is time to crush this evil forever.” He blamed a “whole industry” made up of think tanks, universities, and journals for labeling only the far-right as terrorists while ignoring “far-left political terrorism,” which, he said, is “not a novelty”.

“It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time – anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist, Marxist – but the fundamental character is always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, liberation; an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and right, on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness, and have nothing else to offer the world,” Rubio stated.

Trump’s Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, delivered a speech following the Secretary of State in which he stated that “left-wing political terrorism seeks as its ultimate end the overthrow of our system and form of government” and that it seeks to establish “total control through psychological and physical and actual terror”. Miller added that, as Rubio pointed out, this “is an international network. Antifa, as an example, operates in dozens of countries all throughout the world.”

Miller mentioned Trump’s NSPM-7 from last September, which directs “all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest, and prosecute these political terrorists”. He went further by claiming that “this is an international network”.

NSPM-7 from September 2025 declared ‘Antifa’ to be a national terrorist organization. Miller internationalized this supposed threat: “Antifa, as an example, operates in dozens of countries all throughout the world. They share common networks of funding and organization and information,” he stated.

‘Antifa’ is far from an organized group; rather, as most experts warn, it is an abstract label that different groups use to indicate their ideological leaning. Let me be clear here: I am not in any way advocating here for left-wing ideology or politics—that’s a different discussion. I’m trying to understand where the narrative is going and why. Therefore, the more pertinent question is why “left-wing political terrorism” is being invoked now as an international organized threat that aims to “overthrow our systems and forms of government”.

On July 3rd, 2026, at the iconic Mount Rushmore, during prime time, President Trump delivered a diatribe against communism: “Communism is a mortal threat to American liberty. It is the greatest threat to our country, greater than World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11.” Pearl Harbor was the justification for the U.S. joining World War II, and everything that ensued, including the Cold War, stemmed from that. 9/11 was the justification to launch a “global war on terror”.

In both cases, the nature of the enemy was consequential to the geopolitical theater of the moment. In World War II, it was first the Nazis and it allies and then the Soviet Union. The U.S. was in both cases facing a concrete enemy that challenged it. However, the nature of the enemy in the global war on terror was different. It was nowhere in particular, but potentially everywhere. It was the enemy that a hegemonic power needed to continue justifying its security budget, surveillance, and control when there was no geopolitical actor that could directly challenge it.

“The world looks very different today,” Rubio stated. Indeed, the U.S. cannot sustain its military and financial hegemony anymore. The Secretary of State recognized as much when he stated in a January 30th, 2025 interview with Megyn Kelly that unipolarity was an “anomaly” stemming from the end of the Cold War, and that eventually we “were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multiple great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with”.

In a July 16th, 2026 address from the White House, Trump stated that the “Chinese Communist Party’s policy was to leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president in an effort to reduce the US president’s votes and make him resign or prevent his reelection.” It has been a hallmark of the Trump administration to label its opponents, both at home and abroad, as “communists”.

He famously called Kamala Harris “comrade Kamala”, which was far from an accurate depiction of her. He has also labeled Bernie Sanders as a “socialist slash communist” and, more recently, used similar language for Zohran Mamdani. In fact, it is a common rhetorical device he uses to refer to almost any political opponent in the U.S. Not only him, but Karoline Leavitt has recently used it when referring to some Democrats, as has Speaker Mike Johnson, who said, following Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech: “This is communism, and it has led to the murder of innocent people, tens of millions of them in the 20th century alone. We have to fight this.”

Fighting communism is the narrative the Trump administration seems to be crafting—at home, by labeling political and ideological opponents as such, and abroad, by creating an international coalition to fight “left-wing political terrorism”. The U.S. built a similar “global coalition to fight ‘Islamist terrorism’”.

However, the difference with the threat from “left-wing radicalism” is that, on the one hand, Trump and his administration claim that it has infiltrated Western institutions—from media to academia and politics—and, on the other, to be the main ideology behind particular states.

“Islamist terrorism” stemmed from the Middle East but, except in the short-lived case of ISIS, was not confined to or supported by any particular state. In fact, it is Arab- and Muslim-majority countries that have suffered the most from it. In contrast, Rubio has characterized Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and China as communist, and Iran and Russia as supporting them.

By labeling these countries as communist, Marxist, socialist, or supporters of groups they describe as left-wing, a new—but old, very old—enemy is being invoked: one that is more fitting to the current geopolitical theater because it is concrete and more powerful than “Islamist extremism”.

That is one of the reasons why we are seeing an authoritarian right-wing drift in Western countries. The narrative of the surveillance and control state is replacing that of the welfare state. Security takes precedence over well-being. “The most essential duty of the state – the first responsibility of any government – is to protect its people,” Rubio stated at the beginning of his speech quoted in this article.

“To protect its people” from the internal threat of ideologies that are deemed dangerous because “they are a mortal threat to American Liberty,” according to Trump. And “to protect its people” from external threats of governments that can be labeled as supporting those ideologies because they are a “fatal cancer to civilization,” as Miller stated. Both arguments serve the cause of increased surveillance, centralization, and control, as well as weapons manufacturing, warmongering, and corporate profit in the coming geopolitical theater.

I expect that in the coming years the “Islamist extremism” threat will take a supporting role while “far-left political terrorism” will take center stage for Western countries.