U.S. Pushes Allies to Chase a New Terrorism Target: The Far Left

Source: NYT

When senior Western officials met in Ottawa last month to discuss potential terrorism threats in light of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, a top State Department counterterrorism official delivered an unexpected message.

The United States was as concerned as always about Islamist terrorism, said the official, Monica A. Jacobsen, according to a copy of her prepared remarks reviewed by The New York Times and three officials briefed on the meeting. But, she told her counterparts from Europe, Canada and Australia, the Trump administration also wanted more attention on what it believed was an insidious, underestimated threat: the far left.

Western governments must combat “antifa and far-left terrorism,” Ms. Jacobsen’s prepared remarks asserted, casting the effort as an evolution in counterterrorism following the “global war on terror.” Her prepared speech defined far-left terrorism to include threats from communists, Marxists, anarchists, anticapitalists and those with “eco-extremist” and “other self-identified antifascist ideologies.”

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Ms. Jacobsen’s appeals were part of a sweeping new effort by the White House to press foreign governments and embassies abroad to join its fight against what it calls far-left terrorists. The Trump administration is deploying its global counterterrorism machine against far-left movements like antifa — shorthand for “antifascist” — despite offering little evidence they present a dire threat to U.S. citizens.

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Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/us/politics/trump-administration-far-left-terrorism-groups.html