Welcome to Hub-and-Spokes
Mission
Hub-and-Spokes is a newsletter by Connor Fiddler that translates academic security studies into clear analysis of alliances, U.S. grand strategy, and contemporary policy debates.
The newsletter focuses on the ideas behind today’s most important strategic questions: How do alliances work? Why do states reassure, abandon, or pressure their partners? What does burden-sharing actually mean? How should the United States think about power, credibility, deterrence, and grand strategy in an era of renewed geopolitical competition?
This is not another breaking-news newsletter. Instead, Hub-and-Spokes uses serious scholarship to make sense of the policy debates shaping U.S. strategy, alliance politics, and international security.
Vision
Hub-and-Spokes aims to bridge the gap between academic research and the policy world. Each issue takes important work from journals such as International Security, Security Studies, and related fields, breaks down the argument, theory, evidence, and findings, and explains why it matters for current debates.
The goal is simple: make rigorous security studies research useful to policymakers, defense professionals, students, analysts, and serious foreign policy readers.
What We Do
Each issue of Hub-and-Spokes provides:
Article Breakdowns: Clear summaries of major academic articles on alliances, U.S. grand strategy, and security studies.
Theory in Plain English: Explanations of key concepts such as reassurance, deterrence, credibility, abandonment, entrapment, burden-sharing, balancing, and alliance cohesion.
Policy Applications: Connections between scholarly arguments and current debates over U.S. foreign policy, the Indo-Pacific, NATO, China, defense strategy, and alliance management.
Strategic Commentary: Independent analysis of what the scholarship gets right, what it misses, and how it should inform real-world decisions.
Who We Serve
Hub-and-Spokes is written for:
Policymakers and government officials looking for deeper context behind current security debates.
Defense and foreign policy professionals interested in the strategic logic behind alliances, military posture, and burden-sharing.
Academics, graduate students, and undergraduates studying international relations, security studies, grand strategy, and alliance politics.
Serious readers of foreign policy who want more than headlines and want to understand the research behind the arguments.
Subscribe
Subscribe to Hub-and-Spokes for clear, serious, and policy-relevant analysis of alliances, U.S. grand strategy, and security studies.
