Rubio’s ‘left-wing terrorism’ summit is laughable and dangerous

Sixty-six countries attended US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s summit on left-wing terrorism this week. The farcical event was meant to highlight what Rubio says is a rising leftist threat, largely ignored on ideological grounds.

In reality, it can be read as an attempt to found and codify a US-led fascist international — a new Axis steered by the Trump regime.

Al Jazeera reported:

The “Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism”, taking place on Thursday, brings together government representatives from around the world to coordinate on what the US Department of State calls a “renewed threat” that has “remained a blind spot in the international community’s counterterrorism focus”.

For Rubio, a hardline war hawk obsessed with overthrowing the Cuban government, ‘left-wing’ terror and a vaguely defined ‘antifa’ are the primary threats of the day. Like most of the Trump regime he believes in a long-discredited and racist ‘civilisational’ narrative.

At the conference, he said:

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred above all else, a hatred for civilisation itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best, a revolt of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good.

Time magazine listed those in attendance. Mark them well.

The countries with officials present were: Albania, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Korea, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, North Macedonia, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad and Tobago, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.

Some of these — Israel, Argentina, Hungary and Italy, for example — make perfect sense as attendees. These are states led by far-right thugs, genocidaires and fascists who slot into what some call the ‘Reactionary International’.

New Zealand, Canada and others which claim to be particularly liberal nations should know better. The (purely theoretically) centre-left UK government was also in attendance. The sense is that this is less ‘scratch a liberal, find a fascist’, and more groveling obedience to the US empire. Though it may well be a touch of both.

Rubio wars with the oppressed and an imagined left

Rubio singled out exactly the kind of targets you would expect.

He claimed that this has led to “acts of violence and even terrorism” tied to “left-wing causes” being treated as legitimate forms of political outcry by U.S. officials, pointing in particular to the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.

Predictably (and as the Canary and others have warned) the US is merging the practices and norms of War on Terror with Trump’s new war on the left, the exploited and the oppressed.

This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused, it was treated as sacrosanct, a protected class unto itself. That era has to end.

Time quoted Rubio as arguing that “the international community must come together and rebuild its counterterrorism infrastructure to combat such violence like it did to counter ‘radical Islamist extremism’ earlier in the 21st century”.

All of this fits into Trump’s vision for a ‘homeland empire’. Through his ICE attacks on migrants at home and anti-US governments in the Americas under the guise of a ‘war on drugs’, Trump wants uncontested US rule — or, failing that — fuller domestication of the American continent.

Deputy State Secretary, Christopher Landau, opened with reference to long-dead left terrorist movements as if they were current threats.

He said:

From the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Group in Europe, to the Weather Underground here in the United States, to the Tupamaros and the Montoneros in South America, many of our countries have familiarity in the past with political terrorism, and unfortunately, we’re seeing a resurgence of that again today.

Economic war on the left

And US Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessant, promised to starve this almost entirely imaginary enemy of funding.

He stated:

Ours begins where every campaign of terror does: its financial lifeblood. And at President Trump’s direction, the United States Treasury is bringing the full weight of our authorities to defend the integrity of the U.S. and global financial systems.

Naturally, actual terrorism experts argued the whole basis of the conference was a sham. Director of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, Thomas Renard, said:

What we are seeing now in the United States is that counterterrorism has been completely politicised, instrumentalised.

For instance, the threat from far-right terrorism, which was for decades considered as the primary domestic threat, has now completely disappeared from the US counter-terrorism strategy.

Renard also said the European states had sent only junior ministers.

They are not particularly convinced that this is a topic that justifies this type of gathering, but at the same time, they don’t want to antagonise the United States either. And therefore, this is the compromise they found.

In truth, of course, they should have sent no ministers at all rather than dignify the event.

Civilisational obsessives with guns

White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller — a less well-known but particularly vicious figure obsessed with fascistic civilisational narratives — said:

We must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilisation. If the left is allowed to use the real or actual threat of violence to destabilise our institutions, then those institutions cannot and will not succeed.

Some of this is pure right-wing fantasia. Twentieth century fascism was in part a response to an actual organised left: mass democratic parties, strong trade unions, a sense of capitalist grievance over advances in rights for the maligned, oppressed and exploited. Fascism was, and is, an effort to put people back in what fascists believe is their rightful place and to reset capitalism.

The fact is that no left movement as broad or as powerful exists today. But the truth is fascistic hysteria, as we have seen with Trumpism and other examples, can and does move people — albeit via pure emotion, not fact.

And fascism is rising. Precisely where it is rising is significant as journalist Matt Kennard recently told the Canary.

We need to locate the United States as a centre of global fascism, as the centre of global war, and we need to work out how we can dismantle the US empire.

"We need to locate the United States as a centre of global fascism, as the centre of global war, and we need to work out how we can dismantle the US empire."

We met up with Matt Kennard outside the US Embassy in London to discuss his book, Irregular Army.

During the 'war on… pic.twitter.com/5grfQCVxQf

— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) July 17, 2026

Rubio’s summit is laughable in some ways, as is the rhetoric of the speakers and the cowardice of the nations who attended. But it is dangerous too.

The world is increasingly fractured by active and potential wars, atrocities and economic decline. In that environment, Trumpism has established a foothold, built an armoury with truly global reach, and is seeking to unite disparate forces into a new, disciplined axis of hate.

Featured image via Alex Brandon/ Assosciated Press