He argued that future wars would be fought not between countries, but between cultures, and that Islamic civilization would become the greatest threat to Western domination of the world.

Huntington is credited with helping to shape American opinions on civilian-military relations, political development, and comparative government.

[3] According to the Open Syllabus Project, Huntington is the second most frequently cited author on college syllabi for political science courses.

[12][13][14] He became prominent with his Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), a work that challenged the conventional opinion of modernization theorists, that economic and social progress would produce stable democracies in recently decolonized countries.

In 1968, just as the United States' war in Vietnam was becoming most intense, Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies, which was a critique of the modernization theory which had affected much US policy regarding the developing world during the prior decade.

During the 1980s, he became a valued adviser to the South African regime, which used his ideas on political order to craft its "total strategy" to reform apartheid and suppress growing resistance.

He assured South Africa's rulers that increasing the repressive power of the state (which at that time included police violence, detention without trial, and torture) can be necessary to effect reform.

The reform process, he told his South African audience, often requires "duplicity, deceit, faulty assumptions and purposeful blindness."

[19] Its description of post-Cold War geopolitics and the "inevitability of instability" contrasted with the influential "End of History" thesis advocated by Francis Fukuyama.

The article and the book posit that post-Cold War conflict would most frequently and violently occur because of cultural rather than ideological differences.

That, whilst in the Cold War, conflict occurred between the Capitalist Western Bloc and the Communist Eastern Bloc, it now was most likely to occur between the world's major civilizations—identifying eight, and a possible ninth: (i) Western, (ii) Latin American, (iii) Islamic, (iv) Sinic (Chinese), (v) Hindu, (vi) Orthodox, (vii) Japanese, (viii) African, and (ix) Buddhist.

Huntington argued that this post-Cold War shift in geopolitical organization and structure requires the West to strengthen itself culturally, by abandoning the imposition of its ideal of democratic universalism and its incessant military interventionism.

Other critics argue that Huntington's taxonomy is simplistic and arbitrary, and does not take account of the internal dynamics and partisan tensions within civilizations.

[22] Huntington's influence upon US policy has been likened to that of historian Arnold Toynbee's controversial religious theories about Asian leaders during the early twentieth century.

[29][30] His supporters included Herbert A. Simon, a 1978 laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Simon and Koblitz debated in multiple issues of Mathematical Intelligencer, with other mathematicians joining in through Letters to the Editors column.