Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Obama Doctrine” is a remarkable piece that captures all that is wonderful about Obama the thinker and all that is wrong with his approach to foreign policy. What comes out throughout the piece is that he is exceedingly rational and calculated—“spockian” as Goldberg describes him. There is a logic behind his thinking. He challenges conventional wisdom and moves beyond the echo chamber of Washington policy circles. This is all to be applauded and admired.

The problem is that we do not live in a world of Obamas. Things are simply not so rational and carefully calculated. This is perhaps why the tribalism and atavism that Obama mentions throughout the piece are just so disconcerting to him. It does not fit the mold. Obama might indeed be smarter than everyone else, but he is trying to play chess while the real world is playing checkers.

There are frequent references, ten by my count, to Obama’s various frustrations, with Europe, with the foreign policy establishment (his constant foil), with John Kerry and Samantha Power. This is classic smart guy syndrome.

The danger with such an approach is, of course, what we see today, a global order in disarray, with allies adrift, notably here in Europe, but more troublingly in the Middle East, and Asia. Josef Joffe explained it well in his response piece in the Atlantic: “A realist also knows that the international system, like nature, abhors a vacuum. So ambitious rivals will interpret inaction as invitation.”

This is Obama’s fundamental miscalculation. While in individual cases and in isolation, U.S. restraint might look like a sensible approach, in aggregate and systemically these signals are highly destabilizing. This has broad based effects on global stability and, ultimately, U.S. well-being.

The Iran nuclear agreement is an excellent case in point. I, for one, am a supporter of the agreement, which is innovative and responds to one of the looming and core problems in the Middle East. I further think that the decision to isolate the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, rather than making it a broad-based negotiating platform to deal with myriad issues (terrorism, missile testing, human rights), was the right one. It both limited the potential for spoilers and made it easier to establish international unanimity. The problem here was that the approach on Iran was too detached from everything else. A deal (indeed even just negotiations) on the Iranian nuclear piece was necessarily going to have broader ripple effects throughout the region—even if it is now a place “no longer terribly important to American interests.” But even as the EU3+3 was dipping a toe in the water of negotiations with Tehran, the Administration needed to be engaged in a broader effort to reassure allies and to try to positively channel shockwaves. Instead, what we got was an Administration taking a step back while Iran and Saudi Arabia battled it out openly in Yemen (and by proxy elsewhere) and much later a half-hearted and poorly attended GCC-Camp David Summit, only once the nuclear talks were entering the home stretch.

Viewing things as discrete interests works when you are a middle power or a regional power. But when you are at the very core of order, taking such a narrow view of when to act necessarily has systemically destabilizing effects. It may not be strictly logical, but it is the way the world works. We need a little less Mr. Spock and a little more Captain Kirk.