The last paragraph particularly caught my attention:

Bueno de Mesquita also approved of Obama’s hands-off approach. Bueno de Mesquita ran an experimental version of his Iranian model without the U.S. in it as a player at all, and the coalitions that oppose Ahmadinejad and the bomb emerge a few months more quickly. In other words, American meddling is indeed counterproductive; the less America tries to influence Iran, the more quickly Iran will abandon nuclear weapons, if the logic of the computer is correct.

Really, there are few methods of analysis that are good at showing how an actor’s actions (the US in this case) that are intended to move a situation towards a particular outcome are actually counterproductive towards that goal. This kind of reminds me of the bias that makes us place more value on evidence that we do have rather than evidence that we don’t (or actions taken over actions not taken, since of course, actions not taken and words not spoken, while perhaps just as relevant as those taken, are hard to see or hear).