Introducing Hub-and-Spokes!
Welcome to Hub-and-Spokes!
Why Hub-and-Spokes?
In today’s rapidly changing geopolitical landscape, understanding alliances, defense strategy, and U.S. grand strategy is essential. Hub-and-Spokes is not another China-focused newsletter. Instead, it examines the alliances, strategic ideas, and security debates that shape American power and international order.
The name comes from the U.S. “hub-and-spokes” alliance system built during the Cold War, which connected the United States to key allies across the Indo-Pacific. That system helped counter communist expansion, protect American interests, and provide a durable framework for regional stability. Today, those alliances remain central to U.S. strategy as Washington confronts North Korean aggression, China’s growing power, burden-sharing disputes, defense modernization challenges, and questions about America’s role in the world.
Hub-and-Spokes now goes beyond tracking regional developments. Each issue uses academic research in security studies, alliance politics, and grand strategy to explain the deeper logic behind today’s policy debates. The goal is to connect serious scholarship to real-world questions: how alliances work, why states cooperate or defect, how deterrence succeeds or fails, and what U.S. policymakers should understand about the strategic choices ahead.
What to Expect
Each issue of Hub-and-Spokes is built around one core purpose: to make serious security studies research useful for understanding today’s policy debates.
Rather than providing a weekly news roundup, the new Hub-and-Spokes will take one major academic article, break down its argument, and connect it to real-world questions in alliances, U.S. grand strategy, and international security.
Each issue will typically include:
The Article: A major piece of scholarship from journals such as International Security, Security Studies, or related academic outlets.
The Core Argument: A clear explanation of what the article claims and why it matters.
The Theory: A breakdown of the key concept at work, such as deterrence, reassurance, burden-sharing, credibility, abandonment, entrapment, balancing, or alliance cohesion.
The Evidence: A summary of the cases, data, historical material, or methods the author uses to support the argument.
The Policy Payoff: An application of the article to a current debate in U.S. foreign policy, alliance politics, the Indo-Pacific, NATO, China strategy, or American grand strategy.
My Take: A short assessment of what the article gets right, what it misses, and how policymakers should think about its implications.
Audience
Hub-and-Spokes is designed for:
Government officials and policymakers looking for deeper context behind current security debates.
Defense and foreign policy professionals interested in alliances, military posture, burden-sharing, and strategic competition.
Academics and students studying international relations, security studies, alliance politics, grand strategy, and Asian security.
Serious foreign policy readers who want more than headlines and want to understand the scholarship behind the arguments.
Join the Community
Subscribe to Hub-and-Spokes for clear, serious, and policy-relevant analysis of alliances, U.S. grand strategy, and security studies.
Thank you for following along as Hub-and-Spokes enters this new phase. The goal is to connect scholarship to strategy, theory to policy, and academic debates to the real decisions shaping American power and international security.