to gamble—a player’s risk aversion or risk acceptance—in a foreign policy context is a difficult, iffy business, but it also is an important undertaking if we are to design and solve strategic problems that can be of practical use to intelligence analysts (Bueno de Mesquita, 1985; Morrow, 1987; O’Neill, 2001; see also Fischhoff, this volume, Chapter 10).

Risk-proneness draws attention to how risks, weighted by the value or utility attached to alternative outcomes, shape expected pay-offs. Risk by itself is central to all rational choice models of decision making (Kahneman and Tversky, 1984; Kahneman and Miller, 1986; Riker, 1996; McDermott, 1998; see also Kaplan, this volume, Chapter 2). The fall of Iran’s Shah provides insight into how attentiveness to actuarial risks and their strategic implications might have informed analysis about regime change.

Nondemocratic leaders who survive in office past approximately 1 or 2 years experience a significant year-to-year decline in the risk of being ousted (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Egorov and Sonin, 2005), all else being equal. That does not tend to be true for democrats. So, looked at from this angle, it is easy to see why analysts and decision makers would have been taken by surprise when the Shah was deposed in 1979, 38 years into his rise to power and 22 years after his coronation. However, all things are not equal. Mortality, for instance, cuts against the general trend of long-term political survival. The longer a leader is in power, the older the leader gets, and, therefore, the greater the risk of contracting a serious or even terminal illness.

Analyses of political survival indicate that nondemocratic leaders known to be suffering from a terminal illness—as the Shah was—are particularly vulnerable to being deposed by a coup or revolution, apparently because their supporters, especially in the military, can no longer count on them to deliver a flow of largesse, so they factionalize as they look for a new patron to take care of them (Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2003; Goemans, 2008). The risk of revolution when a dictator is dying is likely also to be increased by the propensity of such leaders to surround themselves with relatively incompetent advisors—that is, advisors who are not likely to be good candidates to become rivals of the incumbent (Sonin and Egorov, 2005). Of course, autocrats understand what drives the risk of deposition, so they commonly try to keep their illnesses secret. But when the best medical care can be had only outside their country, as was true for the Shah (and Mobutu Sese Seko in then-Zaire and many others), then there is little they can do to avoid the risk that the illness becomes common knowledge. The Shah’s illness was known for some time before he was overthrown. The risk to the stability of his regime was, therefore, something that could have been anticipated and calculated. Of course, terminal illness does not guarantee a revolution, but it certainly raises the odds.