The United States has urged more than 60 countries to treat violent left-wing extremism as terrorism, at a Washington summit that signals a significant shift in how the West’s largest power wants political violence policed.

Opening the Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism at the State Department on 16 July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told delegates: “For far too long, however, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot — a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left.”

“Left-wing violence was not just excused. It was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself,” he said, calling this “something worse than a double standard” and declaring: “That era has to end.” He closed by telling the assembled delegations “it is time to crush this evil forever”.

The scale of the threat set out at the summit

Mr Rubio described the movement as “a poisonous resentment, cloaked in the language of equality and justice”, and told delegates: “this is real, and it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied”.

He told the summit that in the United States “the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades”, and that in Germany “far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 per cent in just the last year alone”. The pattern is not new, he said: “between 1970 and 1980, 93 per cent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far extremist left”.

The State Department said 66 delegations attended, including political leaders, law enforcement officials and terrorism researchers. Senior administration figures including White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also addressed the gathering.

Why it matters on this side of the Atlantic

The ministerial commits Washington to pressing allied governments to widen the focus of their counter-extremism work, and the question it poses lands in every Western capital, including London: whether counterterrorism frameworks weight political violence from all directions consistently, and whether the threat picture that guides them is keeping pace with how that violence is changing. How the UK Government responds to the American push — and whether British authorities accept the summit’s framing of a rising far-left threat — will become clearer in the months ahead.

Sources

Image: Official portrait of Secretary Marco Rubio, U.S. Department of State (public domain).