The Euro-Atlantic Community views resilience as an important concept for guiding anticipatory capacity building in the face of varied and complex security threats. The next step is to examine the notion of ‘forward resilience’, a more dynamic concept that recognizes key interdependencies amongst allies, partners and neighbors. In this paper we argue that the ‘capacity to cooperate’ must be a central feature of forward resilience as a shared endeavor. The capacity to cooperate – quickly, effortlessly and to mutual benefit – seems so obvious that it is taken-for-granted by allies and partners. But in an expanded NATO and European Union which must work closely together, with instability in the surrounding neighborhoods, and in the face of a legacy of cooperation failures, we must study the essential factors that increase nations' capacity for transboundary cooperation before, and during, a major security incident.