During the Cold War, American national security seemed clearly defined: to protect against the overarching threat of the Soviet Union and Communist expansion. But with the demise of Communism, America must reconsider its role in the world as dramatically as it did after victory in World War II. As the only real superpower, how should we use our military strength? What are the lessons of the Persian Gulf War? How and when do we cut back on our defense and national security establishment? In the New World Order a country's social cohesion and economic strength at home are increasingly important determinants of its success. To what extent does America need to reconsider its national security in domestic terms - i.e., improving economic competitiveness and learning to live within its means? In this new collection, sponsored by the American Assembly and the Council on Foreign Relations, a group of leading experts assesses the changing conception of national security in the 1990s and its implications for American policy at home and abroad.
Librarian Note: Also writes under the name Graham Allison.
Graham Tillett Allison, Jr. (born 23 March 1940) is an American political scientist and professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is renowned for his contribution in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. His book Remaking Foreign Policy: The Organizational Connection, co-written with Peter Szanton, was published in 1976 and had some influence on the foreign policy of the administration of President Jimmy Carter which took office in early 1977. Since the 1970s, Allison has also been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy, with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism.
Allison is best known as a political scientist for 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 swiftly revolutionized the study of decision making in political science and beyond.