Seeker Blog

The Aug 11, 2008 Russ Roberts Econtalk interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita was fascinating. You can directly download the MP3 audio of the interview here. Better, subscribe to the Econtalk series at iTunes.

Russ has a short and very terse set of notes from the interview, including a couple of paragraphs on the threat profile of Iran, and of particular interest, how important is Pres. Ahmadinejad in the Iranian hierarchy? We knew he was effectively a figurehead or “front man” for the Supreme Council. But, typically, de Mesquita’s research puts Ahmadinejad at 18th in the ranking:

Intro. Danger, threats to the United States. Are Iran Ahmadinejad a threat to the U.S.? Threat to our friends. No missiles with sufficient range to reach the U.S. Can it smuggle a bomb into the U.S.? That’s more a matter of movies. Ahmadinejad is the President of Iran, but virtually all power there is held by the Supreme Council. Has veto power, can remove people from office; all people elected including Ahmadinejad serve at the pleasure of the Supreme Council. Interviews, Ahmadinejad ranked 18th in terms of power. At odds with most people’s public perception. Maybe he’s 17th or 19th; but he’s not 3rd or 4th. He is a very outspoken man, says many outrageous things, so he gets a lot of news coverage. Came to power by election from being mayor of Teheran by carving out a constituency of not-very-well educated who saw in him someone who would advance Iranian nationalist sentiment. His power has faded and his party keeps losing by elections. Media attention also because American media has poor or no access to Ali Khamenei, head of the Supreme Council, most powerful person in Iran. Putin had audience with Khamenei; Western leaders only get to see Ahmadinejad. Why would Khamenei want Ahmadinejad in power? Good for floating trial balloons, has a salutary effect in terms of foreign policy; has convinced some people that the Iranian leadership is irrational, and in doing so have attained a certain amount of deterrent clout. Very Schellingesque (Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winner), soft application of game theory to national security problems, brinksmanship. Strategy that if you convince the other guy that you’ll drive off the cliff, the other guy gets pretty nervous about it.

At 7:43 in the audio:

Do the 17 people ranked in front of Ahmadinejad have similar views? Do they want to build a nuclear weapon? Ahmadinejad would like to. Ali Khamenei would probably like the capacity to make weapons’ grade fuel, bargaining chip, but a weapon itself could lead to a pre-emptive attack by the Israelis. Others in power much more pragmatic, likely to advocate no more than a fuel cycle at the research level, not to produce enough actually to make a bomb. As a social scientist it makes sense to treat these people as if they are rational. Track record of predictions, last 24 years: 1984 predicted in print who would succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, designed someone; predicted instead shared leadership between Ali Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Khomeini died 5 years later. Based prediction on rationality assumption. Rationality doesn’t mean doing good things. It means doing things based on their own best interest. Logic of Political Survival, previous podcast, leaders want to keep their jobs. Data are consistent with Ali Khamenei’s wanting to stay in power. What would their motivations be to building a nuclear bomb? If they could get far enough without Israel’s attacking, they have a deterrent. India and Pakistan: since they both detonated nuclear weapons they have made an effort to get along. Argument is that deterrence claim is false because Israelis will move beforehand. Iran, Shiite force, is in competition with Al Qaeda, Sunni force to be the dominant leader in the Islamic world. They hate each other. Bomb would be a way of achieving nationalist pride, which keeps the party in power while the economy goes to hell. Rational reasons for wanting to build a nuclear weapon. They say want to develop nuclear power for peaceful energy uses, which is their right.

From other reading we have learned that de Mesquita has done repeated consulting assignments for the CIA. In this interview he said his work on Iran was for “confidential sources”.

Readers not familiar with de Mesquita’s work may conclude from this interview that he is an “Iran expert”. In fact the “Iran experts” called him a quack when in 1984, in “Forecasting Policy Decisions: An Expected Utility Approach to Post-Khomeini Iran,” Political Science (Spring, 1984), pp. 226-236, five years before the eventual succession, he correctly predicted that the successors to Khomeni would be the unknown clerics Rafsanjani and Khameini. His forecasting record has been built entirely upon the application of game theory to the politicians’ incentives — in the setting of their political structure.

Highly recommended.