‘The world is the sphere of influence’

On July 16, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened 66 governments in Washington to confront what the State Department calls the “resurgence of political terrorism.” The threat comes from the “radical left,” Rubio said—small groups that variously call themselves “anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist or communist or anarchist or Marxist,” though their “fundamental character is always the same.” He called them “enemies of civilization.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the meeting that a “unified front between international Marxism and the radical Islamic movement” was moving money through the American financial system, and that the Treasury would turn on it the same tools it has used against terrorists abroad. “The threat is transnational,” he said. “Our response must be no less so.” Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, called left-wing violence a “fatal cancer to civilization.”

The U.S. government, Miller said, is now “formally recognizing left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to our national security.” He was pointing to National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which U.S. President Donald Trump signed in September 2025, directing federal agencies to investigate the funders and organizers behind “domestic terrorism and organized political violence.” The common threads the memorandum names include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” and “extremism on migration, race, and gender.”

Since when is any of this national security?

Andrew Preston is a professor of diplomacy and statecraft at the University of Virginia and the author of Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security. Preston says there’s nothing new in the White House’s invocation of national security against its political opponents. Trump may be taking it further than his predecessors did, and neither Congress nor the courts have pushed back hard. By the standards of American history, none of that is a departure.

What is new is that the American idea of national security—which was never only about defending U.S. territory—has gone abroad. Britain, China, Canada, and Sweden have all built national-security councils or laws of their own. The vagueness of the phrase, Preston says, is the point: It covers everything between war and peace. And the rest of the world is taking the idea up just as Americans are losing their faith in it …

Gustav Jönsson: What do you make of the current U.S. administration referring to political opponents as “national security” risks?

Andrew Preston: You can make a good case that the Trump administration does things differently from its predecessors—Trump’s supporters make it, and so do his opponents, who see him as a rupture in American history. In some ways that’s true. But labeling your enemies, foreign and domestic, as national-security threats isn’t new. It goes back to the invention of the concept itself, in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Almost every president from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Trump has thought of his opponents that way.

The question is whether they believe it. Do presidents and their advisers actually think their political enemies are national-security threats—or is it just a useful label for silencing critics?