Are Outcomes to National Security Challenges Predictable?

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is an expert of game theory—the idea that people compete and that they always do what they think is in their own best interest. Bueno de Mesquita uses game theory and its insights into human behavior to predict events and his forecasts have a 90 percent accuracy rate. He boldly predicts that President Obama is unlikely to quash the terrorist influence in Pakistan, that Iran will not develop nuclear weapons, and that global warming will prove immune to government prescriptions. In his new book, The Predictioneer’s Game, Bueno de Mesquita uses his mathematical model to predict outcomes in business, national security, and people’s day-to-day lives based on the self-interest of decision makers. He joins the Council to detail his system of calculation that allows him to predict the outcomes of North Korean disarmament talks, the Middle East peace process, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Iran-Iraq relations following American troop withdrawals, and many other vexing national security challenges. Since the early 1980s, CIA officials have hired Bueno de Mesquita to perform more than a thousand predictions and a study by the CIA, now declassified, found that his predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did.