Marco Rubio has apparently decided the biggest threat facing dozens of nations isn't nuclear proliferation or supply chains — it's Antifa. Per The Washington Post reporting, Rubio's State Department sent invitations to senior officials in more than 60 countries for a July 16 sit-down on the supposed global rise of far-left terrorism.

The RSVP due date: this Friday. The notice period: short. The reaction from much of the invite list: bewilderment.

Behind the scenes, counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka has reportedly been floating the idea of slapping a foreign-terrorist label on Antifa specifically because it would grant access to heavier-duty surveillance powers against Americans allegedly connected to the movement.

One official even conceded, refreshingly on the record, that a chunk of the strategy is really about locking in these powers now — in case a "future Gavin Newsom administration" gets any ideas about turning them back around on conservatives someday. Nothing says confidence in your own political project like preemptively fearing your own weapon.

There's just one small legal hiccup, per a former State Department designation chief: the law requires these groups to actually be foreign, and a group with meaningful presence inside the U.S. flatly doesn't qualify. Antifa, being a loose domestic network of anti-fascist activists, checks that disqualifying box prettttyy thoroughly.

Even inside the administration, the discomfort is showing — some intelligence analysts have reportedly opted out of briefing on Antifa altogether because they don't see it as a legitimate counterterrorism priority.

And overseas, the reception has ranged from confused to openly dismissive: several countries reportedly don't expect their foreign or interior ministers to show, citing calendar clashes (there's a security conference in Aspen that week) and, more bluntly, the fact that they simply don't have an Antifa problem to discuss. One European diplomat put it about as plainly as diplomats get: they don't even have the thing Rubio wants to talk about.

The White House, for its part, denies any internal unease and points to its own counterterrorism strategy document, which promises that the administration won't weaponize these tools against Americans who simply disagree with it — a line that's landing a little differently given everything else in the piece.