Sabermetrics for international relations?

I received the following e-mail from a reader earlier this week:  A crazy question I have to ask: would there be any possibility of developing a useful "sabermetrics for geopolitics"?  I know such a correlation isn't obvious or perhaps even possible.  I realize too, that SABR has been in baseball for over 20 years and is only now discovering the vagaries of fielding...and that geopolitics is orders of magnitude more complex.  Moreover, what to analyze? how? what methods?  what data..and on and on.  I also realize that geopolitics and economics are already full of statistics, so "more" is simply not the answer in and of itself. That being said, is there more out there that can be done in how we organize and think about it?  I have to think there is.  Can it be studied and analyzed in ways that, like Billy Beane did, discover inefficiencies in way most people, governments and organizations look at things that can subsequently be looked at in a different way and/or exploited? A lot if political scientists and international relations scholars would probably sigh pretty loudly at this question.  After all, an awful lot of the field already uses a lot of quantitative measures to conduct statistical analysis of politics.  Indeed, so much of the field uses these techniques that we've already experienced the backlash.  As for foreign policy analysis, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has not been shy about using formal and quantitative methods to make predictions in world politics.    On the other hand.... Baseball Prospectus' Nate Silver recently made a splash when it turned out he was the driving force behind FiveThirtyEight, a blog about predicting the 2008 election.  What Silver does is different from a lot of standard political science, in that he's not really interested in theory all that much.  He's looking for the best empirical fit, rather than the most elegant and generalizable theoretical model.  Because political science places a higher value on the latter, the kind of stuff that Silver does is -- unfortunately -- seen as less interesting within the academy.  So maybe there is a niche to fill.  Two problems, however.  First, in a recent Q&A, Silver noted correctly that, "You can explain a higher percentage of baseball with statistics than you can of politics."  Second, sabermetrics can't work unless it has statistics to measure -- and in international relations, useful large-N data is even more scarce than in domestic politics.  Just because my imagination is limited, however, doesn't mean that a sabermetric approach can't add value.  Indeed, the fact that I can't think of how merely suggests that I've been too professionalized.  I'll leave it to the readers -- are there "metatechniques" developed by sabermetricians that could be applicable to international interactions?