“Islamist Extremism” Defeated; A New (Old) Enemy Needed: “Left Wing Political Terrorism”
Every power that aims to establish control needs an enemy compatible with its objectives. The enemy of “Islamist Extremism” has served the U.S. Empire well to implement greater surveillance at home and control of resources abroad. However, this is a minor enemy of the work to come: the authoritarian drift of Western societies based on the digital control grid and the new geoeconomic reality.
On July 16, Secretary of State Marco Rubio held the “Ministry of Political Terrorism Recovery”. It was reportedly attended by officials from more than 65 countries, although it is not clear which sovereign nations, and many European governments sent low-level officials. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Gideon Sa’ar, attended, and three invited countries declined to send delegates: Brazil, Mexico, and Singapore.
In his speech, Marco Rubio praised how “the entire reconstruction of Western counterterrorism is being rebuilt, from the studs, around a single threat” and how it is building a “global coalition” to fight “against Islamist Extremism”. He saw the effort as successful “to a very large extent” and noted that, although the threat has not disappeared, it is now “significantly reduced”.
The Secretary of State explained further, saying that “the world looks very different today” and that “left-wing political terrorism” is getting worse: “It can no longer be denied or ignored, because it is time to put an end to this evil forever.” He blamed an “entire industry” made up of think tanks, universities, and journals for only labeling the far-right as terrorists while ignoring “far-left political terrorism,” which, he said, “is nothing new.”
“It may wear different slogans and ideologies in place and time – anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist, Marxist – but the basic character remains the same. It is a poisonous anger cloaked in the language of equality, justice, freedom; a great need to tear down what good and good people are, designed only for good people, designed only for evil, and nothing else to give the world,” said Rubio.
Trump’s Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, delivered a speech following the Secretary of State in which he said that “the political terrorism of the left wants the end of the overthrow of our system and form of government” and that it wants to establish “total control through the use of psychological and physical and physical terror”. Miller added that, as Rubio pointed out, this is “a global network. Antifa, for example, operates in many countries all over the world.”
Miller spoke about Trump’s NSPM-7 from last September, directing “all of our law enforcement and intelligence agencies to work together to disrupt, identify, extort, de-bank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists”. He went on to say “this is an international network”.
NSPM-7 as of September 2025 has declared ‘Antifa’ as a national terrorist organization. Miller described this so-called threat: “Antifa, for example, is active in many countries around the world.
‘Antifa’ is far from an organized group; rather, as many experts warn, it is an abstract label used by different groups to indicate their ideological leanings. Let me be clear here: I am not in any way advocating here for left-wing ideologies or politics—that’s a separate discussion. I try to understand where the narrative is going and why. Therefore, the most important question is why “left-wing political terrorism” is now being used as a systematic international threat that aims to “overthrow our systems and forms of government”.
On July 3, 2026, on the iconic Mount Rushmore, for the first time, President Trump delivered a speech against communism: “Communism is the greatest threat to American freedom. 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 reason the US joined World War II, and everything that followed, including the Cold War, was because of it. 9/11 was the reason for starting the “global war on terror”.
In both cases, the nature of the enemy was following the current geopolitical theater. In World War II, first it was the Nazis and the Allies and then the Soviet Union. The US in both cases faced 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 it could be anywhere. It was an enemy that a great power needed to continue to justify its budget for security, surveillance, and control when no state actor could directly challenge it.
“The world looks very different today,” Rubio said. Indeed, the US will no longer be able to sustain its military and financial power. The Secretary of State saw that when he said in an interview on January 30, 2025 with Megyn Kelly that disagreements were “paradoxical” since the end of the Cold War, and that eventually “we are going to go back to a place where you had a mixed world, many great powers in different parts of the world. with”.
In a July 16, 2026 speech from the White House, Trump said that “the goal of the Chinese Communist Party was to use all domestic and foreign elements that were against the US president in an attempt to reduce the votes of the US president and make him resign or prevent his re-election.” It has been a hallmark of the Trump administration to call his opponents, at home and abroad, “communists”.
He famously referred to Kamala Harris as “friend Kamala”, which was far from an accurate portrayal of her. He also called Bernie Sanders a “socialist slash communist” and, more recently, used similar language to Zohran Mamdani. In fact, it is a common rhetorical tool that he uses to refer to almost any political opponent in the US. Not only him, but Caroline Leavitt recently used it when referring to other Democrats, as did Speaker Mike Johnson, who said, after Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech: “This is communism, and it has led to the murder of innocent people, in this decade of the century, ten million.”
Fighting communism is the narrative the Trump administration seems to be building—at home, by calling out political and ideological opponents as well, and abroad, by building an international coalition to fight “left-wing political terrorism.” The US is building a “uniform global coalition to fight ‘Islamic terrorism'”.
However, the difference with the threat from “left-wing radicalism” is that, on the one hand, Trump and his administration say that it has penetrated Western institutions-from the media to education and politics-and, on the other, it has been the main idea behind certain regions.
“Islamic terrorism” originated in the Middle East but, with the brief exception of ISIS, has not been contained or supported by any state. In fact, it is the Arab- and Muslim-majority countries that have suffered the most. In contrast, Rubio has singled out Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, North Korea, and China as communists, and Iran and Russia as supporters.
By calling these countries communists, Marxists, socialists, or supporters of groups they describe as left, a new enemy is invoked—but an old, very old one: more appropriate in the current geopolitical theater because it is more tangible and stronger than “Islamist extremism”.
That is one of the reasons why we are seeing a strong right-wing drift in the West. The narrative of surveillance and control is replacing the welfare state. Security comes before welfare. “The most important job of the state – the first responsibility of any government – is to protect its people,” Rubio said at the beginning of his speech quoted in this article.
“To protect its people” from internal threats from ideologies that are considered dangerous because they are “the greatest threat to American freedom,” according to Trump. And to “protect its people” from external threats by governments that can be called supportive of those ideas because it is “a deadly cancer in civilization,” as Miller said. Both arguments give cause for increased surveillance, centralization, and control, as well as weapons production, warming, and corporate profit in the coming geopolitical theater.
I expect that in the coming years the threat of “Islamist extremism” will take a supporting role while “far-left political terrorism” will take a bigger place in the West.
