Resilience Discourse at the Water’s Edge: American Foreign Policy Traditions and National Security Discourses

The emergence of the concept of “resilience” in national security discourse has been explained as an expedient response to non-traditional security threats, including climate change, pandemics, terrorism, and cyber security, or as an extension of neoliberal techniques of security governance. While there is some evidence to support these accounts, by conducting a discourse analysis of US National Security Strategies released between 2002 and 2022, this article proposes a third, novel explanation for the resilience turn in US national security discourse. This is that due to its conceptual ambiguity, resilience discourse also functions to reconcile diverse political perspectives, thereby helping achieve a high degree of policy consensus. Resilience does this by speaking simultaneously to hegemonic American values, including liberty, freedom, self-reliance, and American Exceptionalism, both sides of the idealism-realism divide, and the respective Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jeffersonian, and Jacksonian foreign policy traditions that set the parameters of US foreign policy debates.