Nathan Leites (July 10, 1912 in Saint Petersburg – 1987) was an American sociologist and political scientist of Russian origins.
[1] Leites earned his doctorate in 1935 at the University of Freiburg.
After emigrating to the United States, he joined the Rand Corporation in 1949 and earned himself a reputation as a knowledgeable analyst of the system of government of the Soviet Union.
He is considered to be the initiator of the operational code approach to the analysis of foreign relations.
[2] His selected works were published in 1977 by Sage as Psychopolitical analysis : selected writings of Nathan Leites.