Atlantic Council 10-8-25: Energy & Defense Summit 2025 (Patreon)

I was back at the Atlantic Council (AC) on October 8, 2025, for what proved to be the body's first Energy and Defense Summit. It was one of several milestones that group was celebrating, along with a new office in Romania. As for the summit, it came about from a desire by the AC to tap into its vast expertise in defense and energy and to capitalize on their overlap. Despite the abundance of former military officers, the mood seemed nonplussed after Trump and Hegseth denounced "fat generals" and told the brass to prepare for deployment in American cities during the prior week. But then again, based on what was discussed, the AC may already see such actions as an inevitability.

As far as Trump's reshaping of the "Department of War" is concerned, what really chafes the Atlantic Council's collective ass is the inability to even discuss climate change and sustainability in the Pentagon anymore. Whenever the culture war was invoked, it was always in the context of climate change. When advise was offered for those currently working in the Pentagon for Trump 2.0, it was solely with how to continue pursuing sustainability. Biden's Secretary of Army even weighed in on this, suggesting Pentagon officials go about their business of sustainability and simply not draw attention to it. Other advocated playing up the national security angle. Questions like "Should we be worried about Trump trying to deploy the regular military to American cities?" just didn't register with this crowd.

Things kicked off with some perfunctory comments from AC executive vice-president Jenna Ben-Yehuda. Her official bio on the AC's website reads about like one would expect for someone in such a post:

She is the founder of the Women’s Foreign Policy Network, a global membership community from over one hundred countries. She earned multiple Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards during her twelve years at the US Department of State where she served in a range of intelligence and policy roles in the Western Hemisphere, including serving as senior military advisor to US Northern Command, US Southern Command, and US Special Operations Command before moving to a leadership role in the private sector.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations as well as the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Councils on US National Security and Geopolitics. She has served on the advisory boards of the George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, the Partnership for Public Service, and GLOBSEC. She is the former Vice Chair of the Air Force Academy Board of Visitors.

For the first panel proper, the AC brought out the big guns. It was moded by Meredith Berger, and featured Landon Derentz, Christine Wormuth, and General Curtis Michael Scaparrotti. Berger was an Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Energy, Installations and Environment) under Biden who also briefly performed the duties of the Under Secretary of the Navy. The latter is the number two post in the entire outfit. Wormuth held the Army's top spot, having served as it's Secretary under Biden. Scaparroitt held a variety of senior commands, including commander of the US European Command, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deputy commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan and commanding general of the 82nd Airborne.

Scaparrotti is one of many senior generals who's career trajectory went through Fort Bragg time and again. Many of them have risen to prominence in the twenty-first century. Predictably, his path intersected with the fabulous McChrystal-Flynn Boys. Scaparrotti was under McChystal's direct command when he oversaw the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan.

This panel, dubbed "Aligning defense strategies with energy security challenges," was mainly concerned with the logistical hurdles a conflict in the Indo-Pacific with China would pose. Wormuth argued that the infrastructure simply wasn't there to adequately resupply US forces in such a theater and additional hurdles would soon emerge from the shuttering of US refining capability on the West Coast. Nonetheless, things shifted back to domestic concerns as the panel contemplated how attacks on the US grid would affect deployments. The 2021 Colonial Pipeline cyber attack was invoked as the type of operation that would be employed to disrupt US logistics.

Steering things back to China, Derentz emphasized that energy for AI competition with the PRC should be paramount. This was a theme several other panels picked up on. Elsewhere, Derentz also raised alarm at how fast China was building up its energy capabilities (i.e. refining, etc.) in comparison to the US. While all panel participants were sure to pay lip service to a hybrid approach to energy, it was clear what the preference was: nuclear. Wormuth spoke of its potential while also trumpeting her work in pursuing micro nuclear reactors for US military bases. Several of the other panels also heaped praise on these micro nuclear reactors.

It later became evident to me why. In 2020, the Biden administration launched Project Pele to develop a deployable micro nuclear reactor. The company that was ultimately tasked to develop the reactor was BWX Technologies, who just so happened to be one of the corporate cosponsors of the event. Here are the Atlantic Council's partner for this summit:

In the past, I've often mused how I may be the only person who's not a spy at these events. For this one, a fair amount of the audience probably weren't spooked up either. Rather, they all seemed to be CEOs of some type of energy company or another. What's more, many of these self-described CEOs, at least the American ones, were young. Most still seemed to be in there twenties, with a few having crossed the 30 mark.

As for the corporate sponsors, several of those names are probably familiar. Schneider Electric Federal is part of the Schneider Electric French conglomerate that specializes in energy management and digital automation. DNV is a Nordic company deeply involved in the energy industry. Invenergy specializes in renewable energy, especially wind and solar. Blackstone is a major investor in this outfit. Summit Ridge Energy bills itself as America's "leading developer, owner, and operator of commercial solar assets."

Despite two companies deeply invested in renewable energy co-sponsoring the event, the summit didn't paint an especially rosy picture of its prospects. I'll address that more below. For now, I just want to note my later realization that a major reason for this summit was networking. The Atlantic Council was clearly putting startups in contact with these large corporations as well as the AC's network within the State/War Departments and Congress.

I've of course known for years that this is how the game is played. But to actually see it first hand was something to behold. Many of the sponsoring companies even had top officials sitting on the panels. At times, it almost seemed like the panels were designed to sell whatever the sponsor was hawking. BWX Technologies was clearly the big winner. Everyone seemed to want a piece of those micro nuclear reactors.

One final point I want to touch on about the first panel before moving along is another theme they introduced and which was repeated throughout: attacks on the domestic infrastructure. General Scaparrotti noted that we're already at war with our "adversaries" here, proclaiming that "They're in our infrastructure." Derenz later echoed this, pointing out how Ukraine shows how energy infrastructure will be targeted. He cautioned that American utilities needed to adopt distribution to brace for these attacks.

The next panel was called "Enhancing NATO's Operational Readiness through energy operability." It was moderated by Reed Blakemore, the first of three that he moded on the day. I suppose it must go with being the director of the Atlantic Council Global Energy Center. He was joined by Jason Knapp, Christopher Olson, and Chamai Shahim. These were all veterans who had been awarded fellowships with the Atlantic Council. As I later learned, the Council is keen to award veterans with fellowships. It then grooms them for positions in multinational corporations, where they can further advance the Council's agenda. I'm not kidding --someone even asked one of the panels for advice on how former AC fellows in corporate America could manage this. Both this panel and the final one were dubbed "Veteran Spotlights," and seemed designed to showcase these AC fellows to the various CEOs and corporate officials in attendance.

As for the panel, it began with Blakemore invoking NATO's recent decision to require each member to increase it's "resilience" spending by 1.5%. This came about at the same time as the bloc agreeing to a broader 5% increase on defense spending. While that got all the attention, the Council seemed far more pleased with the resilience mandate. As I discovered during an earlier visit to the Council this year, "resilience" is what emergency management has been rebranded as. This rebranding has been embraced by NATO. As Shahim pointed, Article 3 is now interpreted as mandating resilience preparedness.

As far as it relates to the increase in resilience spending, the Council was pretty clear on how this should be spent: updating Europe's infrastructure to the Council's specifications. Shahim noted that NATO could be leveraged in this capacity to reshape the EU's infrastructure. NATO can not directly mandate members' infrastructure, but it can do things such as insist on supply lines being uniform. The specter of Ukraine was also invoked when Olson observed that NATO was not well positioned to deal with a "contested" energy infrastructure. Knapp declared that the goal of infrastructure attacks was to "bring pain to civilian populations." That statement only became more ominous as the day went on.

The third panel was certainly one of the more eyebrow raising. The moderator was Morgan Bazilian, who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the World Economic Forum in addition to advising the Council on energy and defense initiatives. One of his most intriguing affiliations is with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). While rarely discussed, IIASA was an extremely influential Cold War era body that brought together cyberneticists from both sides of the Curtain to compare notes. Among other things, the Club of Rome and much of the modern environmental movement grew out of this body, as Egle Rindzeviciute revealed in The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World.

The participants joining Bazilian included Robert Leland, Brenda Shaffer, and Peter Flory. Leland is a Sandia man specializing in renewable energy while Flory was a onetime vice-president of QinetiQ. Shaffer has by far the most colorful CV. She's been accused of being a crypto-lobbyist for Azerbaijan who used their oil money to build up her academic career. Nor was this the only time she's been accused of accepting oil money. Unsurprisingly, she was also a "researcher and policy analyst" for the government of Israel at one point. She certainly lived up to her reputation for this panel.

Things started out with Bazilian musing on what a game changer quantum communications would be while bemoaning the biggest obstacle to updating the US infrastructure: the lack of qualified workforce. The envy was noticeable when he remarked upon the number of trained engineers in the CCP.

Soon, Bazilian and the rest of panel meekly stepped aside so Brenda could drop the hammer. She started out by explaining how policy makers during the first two decades of twenty-first century had been working on the assumption that we were in the midst of an energy transition from fossils to renewables. With a steely gaze, Shaffer informed us that this assumption has proven to be false and that the transition was not happening. She then went on the warpath, insisting that renewables had led to bad investments that were responsible for raising energy costs across the world. Later, she criticized the data used to justify the shift to renewable energy research and hinted that the think tanks backing such policies were heavily subsidized by China. Yes, Shaffer actually suggested renewable energy was a ploy by the CCP to undermine US energy dominance.

Remarkably, not only did no one on the panel push back against her, but they all more or less endorsed this view. Leland specializes in climate change and renewable energy research while Bazilian is also heavily involved in sustainability and renewable energy. Further, several of the main corporate sponsors deal in renewable energy technology. While the need for "energy" diversity would occasionally be invoked during other parts of the summit, the notion that renewables were untenable was never disputed. Leland went so far as to suggest that modeling simulations revealed that nuclear was the only feasible option for energy resilience, even more so than fossil fuels. Flory quipped that "It's going to be a long time before we go to war with electric vehicles" while noting that the Atlantic Council is pushing for a return to "energy realism."

I will say this for Brenda Shaffer: She made me feel kind of smart. Since earlier this year, I've been insisting that the centerpiece of the US's strategy towards China is cutting off the rival challenger's access to energy. If Shaffer is to be believed, that's exactly what the US should be doing. She noted that the US's access to cheap and ample energy gave it a tremendous advantage. In contrast, Europe had made itself extremely vulnerable by committing to renewables. She emphasized that the US needed to think more about disrupting energy supplies to its adversaries.

The final panel before the lunch break, "Deploying nuclear energy to strengthen defense," put the AC's cronyism on full display. The mod was Lauren Hughes, who is a deputy director for the AC's Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative. She was joined by Rachel Jacobson, the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment in the Biden administration and now of The Roosevelt Group; and Joseph K. Miller, a Navy veteran now working as the "President, Government Operations" for BWX Technologies.

As you may have guessed, this entire panel was basically a sales pitch for BWX Technology's micro nuclear generators. Jacobson informed us that the Biden administration offered a lot of support for nuclear and that it was found to be superior to renewable energies in comparisons made by the DoD. She also harped on the need to make the US public more comfortable with nuclear energy. At a policymaking level, Miller insisted that everyone was focused on nuclear power now and that Trump's executive orders on the matter were meant to restore US domination in the field. Much of the rest of the time was spent on how great his micro nuclear reactors were.

The so-called "Fireside Chat" after lunch did not disappoint. It was moded by Debra Cagan and featured Admiral James O. Ellis. Cagan is an unreconstructed neocon who held several minor posts in the State and Defense departments during the reign of Bush the Lesser. At the height of his military career, Ellis headed the United States Strategic Command. After retiring from the Navy, he joined Lockheed Martin's board of directors and became a fellow at the Hoover Institute.

Of all the panels, this may well have been the most disturbing. These two weren't minor fellows at the AC. Cagan has decades of experience in State and Defense while Ellis had an extremely distinguished Naval career followed by a profitable one as a corporate executive. Their views are probably reflective of a broader foreign policy consensus now emerging.

So, what would that be?

Well, they started out by noting the effects of technology. Ellis claimed that the democratization of technology had made the US more vulnerable while Cagan insisted that technological revolutions rendered five year plans obsolete. This created a need for rapid decision making. Ellis suggested that we "need to wave a lot of rules" to speed up technology innovations. The notion of deregulation was a popular theme throughout the summit. But more on that latter.

What was truly disturbing about this presentation was their perspective of the infrastructure as it relates to war. Ellis noted that the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructures have changed the nature of war. The bright side to this is that "Ukraine has become a laboratory" in which the US can explore this new state of affairs. Both Ellis and Cagan believed the types of attacks we've seen in Russia and Ukraine would soon become commonplace here. Cagan spoke of the US's need for a new kind of "architecture" to protect the energy infrastructure. While discussing how this would effect utilities, Ellis suggested that surface to air missiles would soon become a staple of power stations and other such facilities. Cagan highlighted AI data centers as emerging target. At two points during the discussion, she asked "what level of devastation" would it take for the US to "turn the corner" in securing the grid.

To wrap up, Cagan suggested that NATO be less concerned about World War III when dealing with Russia. A good start would be shooting down any Russian drones or other crafts that ventured into NATO airspace. "Not every war is a conflict, and not every war leads to World War III" she mused.

Reed Blakemore was back to moderate the sixth panel. This time around he was joined by Helima Croft, Fernando Ferreira, and Vice Admiral William Merz. As part of her day job, Croft works for RBC Capital Markets and is a contributor to CNBC. In addition to sitting on the AC's board of directors, she's also a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike many of the other participants at the summit, Croft at least openly acknowledges working for the CIA. Ferreira works for the Rapidan Energy Group, a company led by Bush II crony Robert McNally. Merz served as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations under Biden. Previously, he commanded the Seventh Fleet.

Part of me almost feels like this panel baited me. Specifically, Croft made some provocative comments about a current geopolitical hotspot, which she tried to walk back with a "those remarks were off the record" adage, which Blakemore followed up by reminding her about the reliability audience. Given that I was only person in attendance who was completely ignored for the entire eight hours of the event, I'm not sure as to who else they would have concerns about respecting their policies. So as proof that I'm capable of maintaining some semblance of journalistic standards, I shall refrain from discussing Croft's comments.

Besides, this panel provided me with no shortage of juicy comments that were on the record. They further reinforced my read on energy being the US's preferred method for managing China. Merz reflected that "those who control the energy flow control the future." Croft noted that China has been buying crude aggressively for the past year to build up its strategic reserve. She read this as a move by the PRC to "de-risk" their energy vulnerabilities.

However, the most interesting statements were made Ferreira, who's company is heavily involved in energy forecasts. When discussing the market's current "complacency" concerning the price of oil, he suggested that Ukrainian attacks on Russian infrastructures before the winter could provide a remedy to that. He also suggested sanctions on Russia's shadow fleet would constitute a major chokepoint for the US, chokepoints being strategically important areas in which the great powers vie for influence. Ferreira summed up his remarks by saying that the combination of sanctions and Ukrainian attacks on Russia's infrastructure could continue to escalate till the end of the year.

In light of what had been discussed up to this point, I found these statements quite chilling. On the one hand, tariffs are already being employed to punish countries buying Russian oil. Then, at the beginning of October 2025, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the Trump administration will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long range strikes on Russia's energy infrastructure.

It certainly seems like Ukraine, at the urging of NATO, is gearing to do to Russia what the Atlantic Council sees as inevitable in the US: launch relentless strikes on the grid to bring pain to civilians. Earlier panels already suggested using energy as a weapon against our "adversaries" as they supposedly did against us and the need for making the Russian public feel the pain.

Recall that Debra Cagan had twice asked "what will it take" to rally the US public to "energy resilience." I've previously suggested that the US ruling class is desperate for an attack on the grid. I'm even more convinced of this after my most recent visit to the AC. It seems clear that the next step is to massively ratchet up attacks on Russia's infrastructure with an eye toward crippling their ability to refine and distribute oil. If they could take enough refining capability off line this, combined with the sanctions on Russia's shadow fleet, will cause a major spike in the price of oil world wide. Which the US would be far better poised to withstand than China or India. At the same time, Russia's inability to sale or even refine oil would plunge the country into a brutal depression and possibly deprive the public of energy to produce heat going into the winter.

Surely that will get someone to take a shot at the US's infrastructure, right?

No one actually said that, mind you --but I'm sure it crossed a few minds.

At this point I was starting to fade. Turns out, six hours of this shit combined with the mounting suspicion I was starting to pick up on from the Atlantic Council takes a toll. My phone was also dying, so I departed the longue shortly after the seventh panel kicked off. it was moded by Joseph Webster, a senior fellow at the AC's Global Energy Center. The rest of the panel was every bit as distinguished. There was Patrick Hughes of the National Electrical Manufacturers Association; CTC Global's Paige Rodrigues, who doesn't even have an online bio; and Christian Brown of Summit Ridge Energy. The reader will recall that Summit Ridge was one of the sponsors of this event.

I tried to follow this panel as much as possible from the live TV feed in the lobby, but truth be told this panel was the dullest by far. No wonder it was placed right before the 3:15 coffee break. The only really interesting comments came from Hughes, who spoke of the need to prioritize energy for data centers. He firmly believed governments needed the ability to reduce power elsewhere to ensure the flow to data centers. This could entail dimming lights in residential areas, adjusting the temperature of the AC, etc. Reflecting on these capabilities, Rodrigues assured us "a better grid is better for all of us."

The coffee breaking couldn't have come sooner. I was feeling more lively for the second to last panel, and even more so when I realized a sitting Us Congresswoman was on it. Dubbed "Reinforcing Energy Systems Behind US Military Installations," it was moded by Sherri Goodman, who serves on the Atlantic Council's board and is a life member of the CFR. During the 1980s, she was on the staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee for chairman Sam Nunn. In the private sector, she worked with RAND and SAIC in the past. From 1993 till 2001, she served as the first Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Environmental Security), which is now known as the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Energy, Installations, and Environment). Meredith Berger and Rachel Jacobson essentially held the same post in the Navy and Army, respectively. This seems to be the post for the would-be climate warriors across the Pentagon.

Goodman was joined by Jay Owen, the president of Schneider Electric Federal, another of the event's sponsors; and Meredith Pringle, who previously worked on resilience projects across the Air Force before joining Converge Strategies and becoming an Atlantic Council fellow. As for our Congresswoman, her name is Sarah Elfreth, who was elected to Maryland's Third Congressional District in 2025. She previously served in Maryland's state senate from 2019-2025. I was not surprised in the slightest to later learn that Elfreth was heavily subsidized by AIPAC in her congressional run.

Elfreth was quite at home with the Atlantic Council, claiming that she doesn't talk about climate change outside of this audience anymore. When working on the Hill, she prefers "energy resilience." Pringle seconded this, stating that the linkage of energy reform/diversification to national security "does wonders." Owen did his part as well, arguing that nationwide micro nuclear generators were needed to strengthen resilience. He had a major hard-on for getting these things installed in US military bases ASAP and saw the public-private partnership as the route to take.

But it was clear this panel was all about Elfreth. A persistent complaint throughout the summit was the endless red tape and regulations hindering new energy projects. Elfreth was clear on this point: these contractors needed to approach congress and tell them what needed to be changed. That's what she was there for, in essence. She even solicited for projects that could be added on to the 2026 National Defense Authorization bill, and asked for suggestions for Republicans she could approach about co-sponsoring her amendments.

Ultimately, it seemed rather clear who Elfreth considered to be her true constituents, and it was not Maryland's Third District. Seriously, has she ever approached the people who actually elected her about drafting legislation?

The final panel was named after the above report and featured the three authors along with Reed Blakemore. It was also another "Veterans Spotlight" panel, hence Travis Nels, Benjamin Byboth, and Aerial Coreth were all veterans taking advantage of the AC's fellowships. The room was mostly empty for this, probably due to the various CEOs pitching Elfreth and her congressional aide in the longue.

The report, and the panel presenting it, made the purpose of this summit crystal clear: privatization of US utilities. Here's what the report has to say:

The reader will recall that earlier in this piece, I noted how the Council advocated using NATO's Article 3 mandated resilience spending to influence the development of European infrastructures. It would seem that the plan is the same here. The process of privatizing utilities will begin with those linked to military bases. A private company will be brought in to provide a separate grid, or perhaps to "enhance" the current public one.

Regardless, the process of shifting to the private grids will begin in this fashion. The inevitable arguments will follow about the "efficiency" of public-private partnerships and the savings to the taxpayers. Like all public-private partnerships, it will then fall behind and go massively over budget. Be assured, the losses will be socialized while the profits will be privatized. When all is said and done, there will be a state-of-the-art grid, one capable of doing all the things the AC requires of "resilience," i.e. cutting electricity to private residences in the name of keeping the AI-linked data centers humming right along.

Everyone reading this should be terrified beyond comprehension --seriously. Let me just outline the "vision" the Atlantic Council presented at this summit:

• Attacks on infrastructure will become a common component on modern warfare, even in the domestic United States

• The US will ensure this by targeting the civilian populations of its "adversaries" via their grids

• These attacks will largely be carried out by drones and ICMBs and directed by AI

• The flow of energy must be prioritized to AI data centers, so even if you're grid hasn't been damaged by NATO's "adversaries," you will still be subjected to power outages

• Left unstated but implied: it would be wonderful if someone destroyed the current grid. This would make it all the easier to cut through the red tape and regulations in building/privatizing the grid the US needs for "energy resilience."

Inevitably, we come to the question of whether there is a coordinated agenda among the various great powers and where they are taking us. During the height of the lockdowns, much teeth gnashing occurred over Klaus Schwab's comment about owning nothing and being happy about it. Many interpreted this evidence the West was working hand-inm-club with the Chinese.

As Orion St. Peter recently pointed out to me, Klaus wasn't talking about the future, but describing the current state of affairs. in truth, most people living in Western nations already own nothing and are fine with that. Seriously, if you really think you own a major asset like your house, trying not paying the mortgage for a few months and see who really owns it.

In contrast, what the Atlantic Council envisions for the future of humanity will make people wish all that was required of them was to eat bugs for protein.

Not once throughout the entire summit did anyone raise the question of the morality in attacking civilian infrastructures --it was already a foregone conclusion. What this indicated to me is how truly superfluous the ruling elites view humanity. Wars can now be fought on scale scarily imaginable a century ago and they can be managed by a handful of special operators and technocrats. Civilian populations seem to exist only to endure the consequences of these assaults. Otherwise, we're a burden to a grid already overtaxed with rapidly expanding energy demands of AI. Hell, we're a hindrance as our insistence on things like accountability delays the building of the grid of the future. The destruction of both it and us would make the future the AC wants to bring about all the easier to achieve.

Are the Russians or Chinese complicit? They embraced the lockdowns, which the AC views as a blueprint for managing an attack on the grid, after all. Is the future of war then to be the mass targeting of civilian populations with great power struggles as a pretext/rationalization? If the Atlantic Council is to be believed, the answer to that is resounding yes. It would probably be naïve to assume that the ruling classes in China or Russia are anymore humane, and even if they are, they West seems hell bent on forcing the issue.

While I don't consider myself a Marxist per se, at this point, I agree with River: class consciousness is the only thing we have left. Do we, the populations of NATO nations, along with our counterparts in China and Russia, want to die in mass for this brave new world? Perhaps I'm being overly dramatic, but I don't see an outcome for this current trajectory that doesn't result in a Terminator-style future. Sadly, we're far closer to the dystopia than many realize.