FULL SPEECHES: US Sec. Rubio, Miller & Scott Speak on Terrorism, Security & Global Cooperation - 7/16/26

Countering the Resurgence of Political Terrorism 

It is time for the peoples of the civilized world to defend ourselves – to stand united against this encroaching darkness and fight for what is ours.

Author: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio

There has never been a gathering quite like this one.

This is an unprecedented event, inaugurating what we hope will be an unprecedented coalition – prepared to meet an unprecedented moment in our shared history.

The most essential duty of the state – the first responsibility of any government – is to protect its people. This is a sacred obligation that should transcend all political or ideological divisions. It is why we have militaries, intelligence agencies, counterterrorism bureaus, police forces. Keeping our people safe is what all of those things are for.

We are all very well acquainted with what is now described as “traditional” terrorist threats. For 25 years, “counterterrorism” – at least in the West – has meant, first and foremost, the fight against Islamist extremism.

There was a very simple reason for that. On the eleventh of September, 2001, nineteen men murdered three thousand people in my country. Then the same enemy struck Europe – murdering nearly two hundred commuters aboard trains in Madrid in 2004, and fifty-two more aboard London’s buses and Underground the following year. The entire architecture of Western counterterrorism was rebuilt, from the studs, around a single threat. That made sense, at the time. Our job was to keep our people safe. And in the realm of terrorism, the specter of global jihad was the premier threat to their safety.

So we went to work. We assembled a global coalition – working with many of our friends in this room – and we destroyed the ISIS caliphate. We killed Al-Baghdadi, Al-Zawahiri, and Bin Laden. And we built intelligence and law-enforcement systems capable of anticipating and stopping attacks before the public ever hears about them. Jihadist attacks and plots in the United States are down about two thirds since ISIS’s peak. The number of people killed by jihadist terrorism in Europe dropped by roughly 97 percent from 2015 to 2024.

In other words – to a very great extent – our counterterrorism strategy worked. The threat has not disappeared. It will continue to exist, particularly so long as we tolerate an immigration system that imports these threats directly into our homelands. But it has been severely diminished.

The world looks very different today.

For too long, our counterterrorism doctrine has had a blind spot when it comes to extremist violence from the political left. Even today, the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a serious threat is treated as a right-wing fever dream – or worse, a dangerous fascist conspiracy – by many in our press, our universities, and our legacy institutions.

You will no doubt see that dogma rear its head in the coverage of this very conference. In spite of the clear and undeniable reality; in spite of the objective numbers and statistics; in spite of the fact that in this room today, there are representatives from across the political spectrum; we will hear this organized violence and terror dismissed as a partisan fiction.

A whole industry grew up in our countries around the study of “extremism” – think tanks, fellowships, journals, consultancies – with the unspoken understanding that only one kind of political violence was a true threat to the system. A bomb planted by a neo-Nazi group was a nefarious and murderous act of evil. A bomb planted by a Marxist revolutionary was merely a tragic excess of idealism. Perhaps its meanswere misplaced or overzealous; but its ends were virtuous and just.

For years, this extraordinary ideological prejudice was embedded in the way we talked about political violence and extremism. It was repeated, again and again, until it was accepted as the neutral and objective baseline – so entrenched in the mainstream conventional wisdom that it came to be regarded as an apolitical fact.

It is the reason why, in my country, so many people in positions of power have dismissed acts of violence and even terrorism as legitimate forms of political expression, so long as they served a left-wing cause. It is why during the George Floyd riots – as criminals and extremists burned and looted their way through America’s great cities, and nearly brought the nation to its knees – city governments all across the country simply refused to prosecute them. It is the reason for that now-infamous image of a news anchor standing in a neighborhood consumed by flames, overlaid with a chyron declaring the protests “mostly peaceful.”

This was something worse than a double standard. Left-wing violence was not just excused, but treated as sacrosanct – a protected class unto itself.

But that era is over.

The coalition here in this room today includes political leaders, experts, and law enforcement officials from more than 60 countries across the world. You have come here from a wide range of governments, parties, and political persuasions.

Some of your governments and mine disagree – publicly and sharply – about trade, about energy, about immigration. You did not come here because you have been persuaded of every single aspect of the American view of the world.

You came because two weeks ago, a 72 year old woman was burned over 80 percent of her body in her own home in Greece and died – executed by a firebomb because her daughter dared to stand for office.

You came because for five days this winter, the lights went out in Berlin – the longest blackout in the city since World War II, sparked by an attack that left tens of thousands of households without power in the freezing cold, and an 83 year old woman dead.

You came because a month after that Berlin blackout, a French 23-year-old succumbed to traumatic brain injuries – beaten to death on the streets of Lyon by a group of far-left militant thugs.

You are here because your political leaders are being attacked, stabbed, and shot in your streets. Because your businesses have been bombed. Because your railways have been sabotaged. Because your police officers have been beaten and burned.

You are here because this is real, it is getting worse, and it can no longer be denied or ignored. Because it is time to crush this evil forever.

The simple fact is, none of this is new.

Far-left political terrorism is not a novelty. It is not a fiction manufactured by conservative politicians. For most of the modern era, it was the dominant form of political violence.

Every one of our friends here from the nations of the Western Hemisphere remembers the decades of kidnappings, bombings, assassinations and executions – the violent terror of the Tupamaros, the Montoneros, FARC, the ELN. You remember the inhuman savagery of Peru’s Shining Path – the Maoist fanatics who massacred the peasant villages of Peru, hacking pregnant women and newborn infants to death with axes and machetes. You remember the tens of thousands of Marxist guerillas trained to kill in Castro’s Cuban terrorist camps.

All of you here from Europe remember the machine-gun massacres of Italy’s Red Brigades, which held a five-time prime minister captive for 55 days before subjecting him to a revolutionary “people’s trial” and executing him in 1978. You remember the Red Army Faction’s nearly three-decade campaign of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations in Germany, murdering dozens and injuring hundreds more. You remember the “17 November” organization in Greece – the Marxist extremists that terrorized Athens for more than a quarter century, including shooting my country’s CIA station chief dead outside of his home, in front of his wife, as they were returning home from a Christmas party.

And here in America, we remember the same reign of deadly terror, justified by the same slogans, motivated by the same wicked ideas. We remember the Weather Underground, which bombed the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Capitol. We remember the Black Liberation Army, which staged armed robberies and executed police officers at point-blank range. We remember the Symbionese Liberation Army, which shot a public-school superintendent to death with cyanide-packed hollow-point bullets.

In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil – a rate of nearly five a day.

The overwhelming share of that violence came from left-wing extremists. Between 1970 and 1980, 93 percent of terrorist attacks in the West came from the far left.

These are numbers that would shock most Americans today – because we’ve been taught to believe that this kind of political violence simply doesn’t exist.

But it does. Our nations bear the scars to prove it.

And today, we face a new wave of this old evil.

Here in the United States, the share of left-wing terrorist attacks and plots has risen to levels not seen in decades. In Germany, far-left violence has jumped by more than 40 percent in just the last year alone. In Greece, more than 80 percent of radical violence is now driven by far-left and anarchist actors.

These are not abstract statistics. Americans have seen what those numbers mean. An all-out assault on our immigration officers – sniper attacks, explosives, armed ambushes. A transgender shooter opening fire on Catholic elementary school students as they pray, his guns marked with slogans like “Where is your God now?”. A healthcare executive gunned down in cold blood. Multiple assassination attempts on a sitting president. And the murder of the greatest conservative activist of a generation – a husband and the father of two young children, shot and killed while speaking to a crowd of students.

This is a distinctive and unique evil. It has always been driven by a hatred, above all else, for civilization itself. It is a revolt of the worst against the best; of the weak and the cowardly against the strong and the good. It is perpetrated by those who cannot build, cannot create, cannot achieve great things – and take their revenge upon the world for their own inadequacy by seeking to destroy those who can.

This is what radical leftism is. It may wear various different slogans and ideologies across place and time – anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, communist, anarchist, Marxist – but the fundamental character is always the same. It is a poisonous resentment cloaked in the language of equality, justice, liberation; an overwhelming need to tear down what greater men have built, to wreck what is beautiful and right, on behalf of people who are only filled with ugliness, and have nothing else to offer the world.

Through violence and terror, they once again seek to impose their ugliness on all of us.

The old dogma was wrong. None of this is driven by “idealism.” It is not “utopian” – quite the opposite, in fact.

One of the criticisms you sometimes hear of communism is: “It sounds good in theory, but it never works in practice.” But that’s not true. It doesn’t sound good in theory. The world it envisions for all of us is small, flat and gray – leveled of all exception, drained of all that is good and noble in the human soul. It is a world without courage, creativity, or ambition; without heroes or glory or great causes to strive towards. Without miracles. Without myths. Without men who rise above the rest to do incredible and extraordinary things. Without God.

For these architects of revolutionary violence, the towering achievements of our civilization are an unbearable humiliation – a reminder of what they cannot do or be. So they choose to destroy. They attack pipelines, railroads, laboratories, power grids: the physical, embodied symbols of power, invention and achievement.

This is the nature of the terrorism we face today. They despise the West because the West is great.

This is an international conference, because we are facing an international – a transnational – threat. These are not distinct and isolated cells, but interconnected networks. They do not recognize our borders; they do not believe in the nation-state itself. They coordinate, communicate, travel, train, and act together, sharing the same infrastructure, the same enemies, the same mission. Antifa militants and their comrades travel from across Europe and the Americas to participate in each other’s attacks; funnel propaganda, training materials, and target information through shared encrypted channels; move through underground networks of safe houses; and finance and sustain their operations through transnational funds.

And they work alongside hostile foreign states that share their mission. Iranian proxy networks are increasingly intimately tied to leftist militant groups around the world. The Cuban regime’s sprawling intelligence and ideological network helped to build the far left in our country and our hemisphere – and it remains inextricably linked to far-left groups and movements across and beyond the West.

Today’s far-left terrorists can raise money in one country, host their communications in a second, receive training in a third, recruit militants in a fourth, and strike a target in a fifth.

We must confront this menace together. We will either cooperate across our borders – or the terrorists will continue to exploit the gaps between them.

Under President Trump – for the first time – the United States is building the infrastructure, the partnerships, and the strategy to defeat the scourge of far-left terror.

President Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, outlining a comprehensive strategy to investigate and disrupt Antifa terror networks and their allies. Last November, the State Department designated four violent far-left extremist groups as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. There will be more designations soon.

In December, we announced Rewards for Justice offers of up to ten million dollars for information disrupting the financing behind these groups. In May, we convened the first Counterterrorism Law Enforcement Workshop, joining American law enforcement officials and their counterparts in our partner nations together to map and develop strategies for dismantling these networks. The next workshop will be co-hosted with our partners in Germany. The coalition we’re building together is already bearing fruit.

We are here today to build on that work.

We can – and must – identify and map this threat, and rebuild our counterterrorism architecture to defeat it – just as we have done together before. Through intelligence and information sharing; through coordinated law enforcement strategy; through financial targeting and disruption; we will dismantle these networks, brick by brick.

It is time for the peoples of the civilized world to defend ourselves – to stand united against this encroaching darkness and fight for what is ours.

Marco Rubio was sworn in as the 72nd Secretary of State on January 21, 2025. The Secretary is creating a Department of State that puts America First.

 

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