New State Department visa restrictions on far-left terror groups aim to address a threat easily “dismissed as a partisan fiction,” the U.S. secretary of state said.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that after decades of focusing primarily on Islamist extremism, Washington’s “counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot” when it comes to left-wing political terrorism.
Rubio made the remarks while opening the U.S. State Department’s Ministerial on the Resurgence of Political Terrorism, attended by representatives from more than 60 countries. The Trump administration has said the conference is intended to strengthen international cooperation against what it describes as a growing transnational threat from far-left extremist groups.
“For 25 years, the term counterterrorism—at least in the West—has meant, first and foremost, the fight against radical Islamist extremism. And there’s a very poignant reason for that,” Rubio said, citing the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States and additional bus and train bombings in Europe.
“The entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt from the studs around the singular traumatic event. That made sense at the time,” he said, adding that coordinated international efforts have sharply reduced the threat of jihadist attacks on the U.S. homeland.