Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from over 60 countries to Washington for a ministerial meeting centered on a premise that many attendees appear to reject: that a transnational far-left terrorist movement known as antifa poses a threat to the democratic world. Allies were urged to mobilize against this stated enemy, even as nations such as the Netherlands and Germany informed their host that they could find no evidence of any such organized group.

Some U.S. intelligence analysts have declined to provide briefings on antifa at interagency meetings, reportedly because they do not regard it as a serious counterterrorism threat.

Jason M. Blazakis, a terrorism scholar who spent a decade directing the State Department office responsible for designating terrorist organizations, writes that he understands their skepticism. The threat as described by the administration, he argues, does not exist in the form presented.

Antifa Is Not an Organization

As Blazakis and others have written previously, antifa is not a singular group. It is a movement and an ideology — a loose commitment to opposing fascism. In its most organized form, it consists of scattered local collectives such as Rose City Antifa in Portland, Oregon.

There is no membership roll, no command hierarchy, and no funding structure. No leader of antifa has ever been identified — the Trump administration has not named one — and there is no record of deadly attacks attributed to a U.S.-based organization called antifa. By contrast, groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida have killed tens of thousands of people and maintain documented chains of command. Antifa does not. A movement with no head cannot be decapitated, and an organization that does not exist cannot be sanctioned.

The Trump administration, Blazakis argues, effectively created one.

Executive Order and Presidential Memorandum

The effort began on September 22, 2025, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. The order describes antifa as "a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government" and directs every relevant agency to investigate and dismantle its operations.

Two problems are immediately apparent, Blazakis writes. First, no legal authority exists to designate domestic organizations as terrorist groups — a gap that Congress has deliberately preserved for First Amendment reasons. Second, the order designates as an organization something the FBI's past leadership has described as an ideology.

Three days after the executive order, the White House implemented it through National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which converted the directive into operational machinery. The memorandum directs the Treasury Department to identify and disrupt financial networks that fund what it deems domestic terrorism. It instructs banks to file suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, the U.S. government's financial intelligence unit.

This means that the government's financial surveillance apparatus — originally built to trace al-Qaida's finances after the September 11 attacks — is now being directed at Americans the administration considers left-wing.

The memorandum also directs the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces to coordinate a comprehensive national strategy to investigate, prosecute, and disrupt entities and individuals. That mobilizes a network of roughly 200 task forces comprising over 4,000 personnel from federal, state, and local agencies.

The wording of National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, Blazakis notes, reveals what he characterizes as the administration's true intent. It identifies the markers of the supposed terrorist movement as anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity. It criticizes the movement for its hostility toward those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality. Those are not indicators of terrorism, Blazakis writes — they are political positions. By contrast, the FBI and DHS have publicly assessed that racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, particularly white supremacists, constitute the most lethal domestic terrorism threat.

State Department Designations of European Groups

The foreign component of the campaign followed in November 2025, when the State Department designated four European groups — one each from Germany and Italy and two from Greece — as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and Foreign Terrorist Organizations pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The designated groups are real, Blazakis acknowledges, and some of their members have committed genuine crimes, including assaults and small-scale bombings. However, he notes that not one of the four has carried out an attack resulting in any fatalities. German leaders have stated that the threat from one of the designated groups, Antifa Ost, or Antifa East, had recently decreased significantly.

As the former head of the State Department office that recommended terrorist designations, Blazakis writes that he was involved in the designations of hundreds of individuals and organizations, and that the threshold was never this low. The Foreign Terrorist Organization list, he argues, loses its meaning and deterrent power when it includes groups whose body count is zero while genuinely lethal movements go unlisted.

The Foreign Nexus and the Ministerial Meeting

The sequence of events leading up to the State Department's ministerial is significant, Blazakis writes: invent the organization by executive order; build the enforcement machinery by presidential memorandum; manufacture the foreign nexus through the State Department's Foreign Terrorist Organization designations; and then convene the world to ratify the narrative. Each step, he argues, launders the previous one.

Behind it all, Trump administration officials have discussed using the foreign terrorism labels to justify going after Americans with links to the movement, Blazakis reports. Allies such as the Netherlands have explained that antifa could not be designated as a terrorist group under their laws due to its lack of centralized structure.

Counterterrorism tools are among the most powerful instruments the U.S. government possesses, Blazakis writes. Using them against an ideology — one defined by opposition to fascism — does not, in his assessment, make America safer. Instead, he argues, it signals to every ally the U.S. asks for help that the world's leading counterterrorism power can no longer distinguish between a threat and an opponent.

Potential Consequences

Blazakis identifies four specific risks arising from the push to internationalize the antifa threat:

First, if the State Department emerges from the July 16 meeting with allies willing to brand antifa a terrorist organization, it would embolden the administration to claim a global far-left conspiracy. That could lead to a State Department foreign terrorist designation, meaning Americans could have their bank accounts frozen and potentially face prosecution for providing material support to a movement rather than an organization. The material support statute — 18 U.S.C. § 2339B — criminalizes providing virtually any form of assistance to designated entities, including training, expert advice, and services. The Supreme Court upheld this breadth in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010), ruling that even non-violent advocacy aimed at peaceful conflict resolution could constitute prohibited support.

Second, it could chill freedom of speech and assembly. Once other governments treat antifa as a terrorist entity, the U.S. government would gain cover to shut down protests under the guise of countering global left-wing plotting.

Third, it could justify the revival of programs like the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the bureau's 1956–1971 campaign of surveillance, infiltration, and disruption that targeted civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King Jr., anti-war organizations, and the women's movement. A 1976 Senate investigation known as the Church Committee documented systematic abuses against lawful political activity — the same kinds of activity the bureau was supposed to have abandoned.

Fourth, as one European counterterrorism scholar recently warned, the summit exposes a widening split between American and European counterterrorism priorities and the Trump administration's willingness to bend counterterrorism policy to partisan ends. That divergence, Blazakis writes, is the real hazard — far more than any phantom left-wing terrorist group — because European counterterrorism relies so heavily on U.S. intelligence.

Whatever the outcome of the ministerial meeting, Blazakis concludes, there is no version that will make Americans safer. Genuine threats — from groups with leaders, actual funding, and malicious intent — will receive less attention from the U.S. and any ally co-opted into taking action against antifa.

Jason M. Blazakis is Professor of Practice and Director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at Middlebury College. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.