Allison has spent his entire academic career at Harvard, as an assistant professor (1968), associate professor (1970), then full professor (1972) in the department of government on the strength of his book
Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (1971), in which he developed two new theoretical paradigms – an organizational process model and a bureaucratic politics model – to compete with the then-prevalent approach of understanding
foreign policy decision-making using a
rational actor model.
Essence of Decision revolutionized the study of decision-making in political science and beyond. in May 1991 From 1977 to 1989, Allison was
dean of the
Harvard Kennedy School at
Harvard University. Over the course of his tenure as dean, Harvard Kennedy School increased in size by 400% and its endowment by 700%. He was associated with the
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans from 1993 to 1994, where he coordinated strategy and policy towards the states of the former
Soviet Union. President
Bill Clinton awarded Allison the
Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, for "reshaping relations with
Russia,
Ukraine,
Belarus, and
Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal". Allison directed the
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 1995 until 2017, when he was succeeded by former U.S. Secretary of Defense
Ash Carter. In a 2012
Financial Times article titled "Thucydides’s trap has been sprung in the Pacific", Allison coined the term the
Thucydides Trap to argue for the possibility of a war between the United States and China. Allison later defined as the Trap as a historical pattern where "when one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result," and in 2017 expanded his argument about a future conflict into a full-length book,
Destined for War. The theory is based on the
History of the Peloponnesian War, in which
Thucydides wrote, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." Allison asserts that circumstances at the start of
World War I (involving British fears about Germany), the
War of the Spanish Succession, and the
Thirty Years' War (involving French insecurity about the Habsburg empires of Spain and Austria) exhibit the trap. The term appeared in a paid opinion advertisement in
The New York Times on April 6, 2017, on the occasion of U.S. President
Donald Trump's meeting with Chinese President
Xi Jinping, which stated, "Both major players in the region share a moral obligation to steer away from Thucydides's Trap." Both Allison's conception of the Thucydides Trap and its applicability to U.S.-Chinese relations have encountered heavy scholarly criticism. In March 2019, the
Journal of Chinese Political Science dedicated a special issue to the topic, suggesting
power transition narratives do appear to matter with regard to domestic perception. Allison remains
Douglas Dillon Professor of Government at Harvard. Allison has also been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies (1973–74); member of the visiting committee on foreign policy studies at the
Brookings Institution (1972–77); and a member of the
Trilateral Commission (1974–84 and 2018). He was among those mentioned to succeed
David Rockefeller as President of the
Council on Foreign Relations. In 1979 Allison received an
honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at
Uppsala University,
Sweden. In 2009 he was awarded the
NAS Award for Behavior Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War from the
National Academy of Sciences. Allison has also been a member of the board of trustees for the lobbying group USACC (United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce). Allison is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and a member of the
Council on Foreign Relations. Allison's proposed a "fourth US-China communique" at the
56th World Economic Forum, which was criticized in Taiwan for adopting pro-Beijing framing.
Defence analyst work Allison has been heavily involved in
U.S. defense policy since working as an advisor and consultant to
the Pentagon in the 1960s, and has been consultant for the
RAND Corporation. He has been a member of the
Secretary of Defense's
Defense Policy Board from 1985. He was a special advisor to
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger for three years in the second term of office of
Ronald Reagan. == Publications ==