It seems like hardly a day goes by without President Donald Trump disparaging U.S. allies or threatening to pull out of NATO. But less understood is that even as the president attempts to upend old alliances, his administration is also trying to create a new coalition with one goal: quashing the anti-fascist left.
A recent New York Times report — citing interviews with current and former U.S. officials, officials in foreign governments and internal State Department documents — lays out how the Trump administration is lobbying countries around the world to join the U.S. in identifying far left “terrorism” as the preeminent threat to global stability and taking steps to crack down on it.
It has always been a mistake to view Trump’s right-wing nationalist outlook as “isolationist.”
These efforts are not about focusing on threats based on data. Instead, they illustrate how the Trump administration is expanding its ongoing agenda to transform law enforcement into a political tool for the right. But while this particular effort is focused internationally, its most concrete effects may be felt at home in new ways of repressing dissent.
The Times reports that:
- Sebastian Gorka, the senior counterterrorism director on President Trump’s National Security Council, is a leader of these efforts in the administration. He has repeatedly told colleagues “there are no lone wolves” when it comes to left-wing extremism and is pushing allies to find links between Americans and far-left groups abroad.
- The first steps were taken last November, when the State Department designated four far-left groups in Italy, Germany and Greece as terrorist organizations.
- According to prepared remarks, a top State Department counterterrorism official pressed her counterparts from Europe, Canada and Australia at a March meeting in Ottawa to consider “antifa and far-left terrorism” as the next frontier of the “global war on terror,” and counseled them to recognize some far-left actions “as political terrorism rather than mere protest or criminality.”
- The U.S. wants to convene multiple international summits over the coming months to coordinate efforts against the anti-fascist left with other countries. This includes a May workshop with foreign law enforcement officials in The Hague to “teach them about the dangers of far-left groups and how to counter them,” according to the Times. Invitees include officials from Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, India and Indonesia.
These systematic efforts serve as yet another reminder that it has always been a mistake to view Trump’s right-wing nationalist outlook as “isolationist.” The president is less interested in withdrawing from the world than he is in reordering it around different principles. He doesn’t see sovereign nations as much as he sees leaders and ideological factions; he regularly seeks to align himself with and embolden right-wing authoritarian elements, and to weaken their adversaries.
The clearest sign that the anti-antifa program is about amassing political power and not about safety is that government and academic data show that right-wing political violence is a far more serious security threat than left-wing political violence in the U.S. (The same is true in some of the countries the U.S. is trying to partner with, such as Germany.) The specter of left-wing terrorism, however, is a useful pretext for surveillance and crackdowns on Trump’s opposition.
The Trump administration’s designation of antifa-affiliated groups abroad as terrorist groups and calls for other countries to find connections to Americans is a potentially cunning tactic. Theoretically, the Trump administration could use an increasingly expansive web of affiliations — however tenuous — to make connections between activists in the U.S. and those abroad and then accuse the American ones of “supporting terrorism.” Additionally, constantly broadening what constitutes terrorism gives the state license to use extraordinary violence against individuals. Recall that the Trump administration initially attempted to justify federal immigration agents’ killings of protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti by labeling them as “terrorists.”
The vagueness of the term “antifa” — short for anti-fascist — is a feature, not a bug. Antifa is not a specific organization or a movement with leadership, but rather an umbrella term and label for a variety of social movements that see themselves — or are seen as — part of a coalition against the far right. Some protests affiliated with antifa use violence to achieve their political goals, and many others don’t. But an ambiguous definition lets the Trump administration lump nonviolent activists together with violent activists, and to characterize virtually any anti-right wing activity as “extreme.” Moreover, the effort to describe far-left activity as terrorism allows the Trump administration to justify curtailing civil liberties.
Trump’s international war against an antifa terrorist threat is fundamentally disingenuous, a method for a sweeping crackdown on dissent and emboldening the global right. It’s unclear how successful he will be in convincing other countries to get on board, but it won’t be for lack of trying.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy.