Preparing the Nation for "Resilience" with the Atlantic Council (Patreon)

In 2016, the Atlantic Council launched the Adrienne Arsht Center for Resilience. As the name implies, it is the brainchild of Adrienne Arsht. She hails from a politically connected-family in Wilmington, DE. A onetime attorney, she served as the chairman of TotalBank from 1996 to 2007, at which point she sold it for a few million. Her late husband, Myer Feldman, was a political aide in the JFK and LBJ White Houses.

With those kind of bona fides, you can get your name plastered all over the Atlantic Council's DC headquarters:

The "Resilience first: Strengthening individuals, securing the United States, and protecting the free world” event the Atlantic Council threw on July 8, 2025, was the launch of the "Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative." In 2024, the Initiative established a task force to craft a "future work program" that establishes "Resilience" as a core component of security. The task force has recently completed it's maiden report and this was it's unveiling. It was hailed as bold and groundbreaking.

Naturally, Adrienne was present for this Earth-shattering event. During her opening remarks, she even boasted of how ChatGPS now cites the Atlantic Council's definition of "Resilience" in it's answer.

How then does the Atlantic Council characterize resilience?

Well, they've essentially co-opted the word and used it to rebrand emergency management. This is apparently of great importance for two reasons: 1) Trump's executive order curtailing FEMA has necessitated a new framework and 2) an attack on the US by our "adversaries" is inevitable. Former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs (and now a member of The Roosevelt Group, a "strategic consulting firm") Alex Wagner practically salivated when he made this point. He insisted that the early stages of the attack would look unlike anything ever seen before and that it would surely target America's infrastructure.

The storied report echoed Wagner's comments.

Fear not, there are plenty of other "natural threats" that "Resilience" can also prepare us for if you're of the green persuasion.

These people have big plans for "Resilience." They envision it as the third pillar of national power. They even have a graph illustrating this:

One can only wonder at how many intellectual heavy weight it took to conceive of this...

It's also interesting how much the report addresses genetics and bioengineering as a part of "Resilience."

Wagner hammered this connection even more in his comments. He boasted of the staggering amounts of medical data the DoD has gathered on both service members and their families and how analysis of said data can help "predict" things like future health issues and mental illness. As you may have guessed, the reports suggesting doing something like this on an international level to locate the most "Resilient" human types.

Gosh, and RFK just announced a big national initiative to get Americans to embrace "wearables" as a means of having constant real time medical data available. The synergy here from these opposing camps is just remarkable! In many ways, the "Resilience" panel is Democratic foreign policy staff-in-exile. Just consider the CV of host Samantha Vinograd posted on the Council's website:

"Samantha Vinograd is a nonresident senior fellow with the Adrienne Arsht National Security Resilience Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. Previously, she was the assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the US Department of Homeland Security. She was previously a CNN national security analyst, a senior advisor at the Biden Institute at the University of Delaware, and a visiting fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. She began her career under former US President George W. Bush as the deputy US Treasury attaché to Iraq, and she subsequently served on former US President Barack Obama’s National Security Council as the director for Iraq, director for international economics, and as a senior advisor to the national security advisor. She later joined Goldman Sachs, where her work focused on building public private sector partnerships across a broad range of policy and business issues, and she later led global public policy at Stripe."

And yet, when they looked for a model for how the US could implement "Resilience," they all came back to one program: Trump's Operation Warp Speed.

They also praised trailblazing efforts from the likes of Ukraine and Taiwan for taking the initiative in putting their respective nations on "Resilience" (read: war) footing before hostilities began/will begin.

Of course, now that FEMA is limping along in a diminished capacity, there's no government body with the resources to handle "Resilience" domestically. But fear not, the solution is already being worked out: Public-private partnerships!

Since this was mostly a Democratic audience, they couldn't spell out how Trump is setting the standard just as he did with Operation Warp Speed. The use of Palantir and private detention centers by ICE to handle the immigration "emergency" is surely the model FEMA will be using when the infrastructure goes down. Fortunately, the public is more "sophisticated" now than when they chaffed over Blackwater being deployed in the aftermath of Katrina...

If you have any doubts, just keep telling yourself: Trust the science....

Or consider the aptness of these images: