Greg Scoblete shatters the main conceit in Obama’s address to the U.N. General Assembly today:

This is a noble sentiment, and at the level of abstraction, probablyly true. But when we descend from the realm of abstraction, it falls apart. China no doubt wants to keep the nuclear club elite, but won’t join in sanctioning Iran or pressuring North Korea. Pakistan doesn’t want to suffer from terrorist attacks, but won’t abandon the leverage provided by the Taliban. The world professes alarm at climate change, but can’t translate that alarm into concrete policy decisions commensurate with the task.

It’s all well and good to cooperate with other nations toward common goals. But such action has to be grounded in the reality that we’re still in a competitive, zero sum international system.

One of the constant themes in Obama’s foreign policy speeches is interdependence. According to this view, interdependence is something that is both unavoidable and also eminently desirable. Even though it makes every problem under the sun an American problem demanding American “leadership” and has potentially catastrophic consequences for all involved, interdependence has to be deepened and intensified as much as possible. It also follows from this conviction that major international actors ultimately have a set of shared interests that ought to compel them to cooperate. One would have to ignore, for example, that Russia and China (and, for that matter, India) have significant vested interests in doing business with Iran and will always try to prevent Western-led attempts to isolate and punish Iran.

Not only are these states uninterested in sacrificing their interests for the sake of an ideal of nonproliferation that they do not respect, but they do not even see the possibility of Iranian proliferation as a problem to be solved. Our officials assume that the Russians must want to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, because they have already concluded that this is what rational international actors must want. They begin from their assumptions and try to force other states to act according to their expectations. Unsurprisingly, they are routinely disappointed. One of the most significant problems with theories of international interdependence is that they blind their adherents to the reality of divergent national interests. This attachment to the idea of interdependence also leads its advocates, who are almost entirely to be found in Europe and America, to confuse what they want for what the world needs.

Sometimes the absurdity of this confusion becomes too overwhelming, as it did in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and even believers in interdependence had to step back and realize that Washington’s obsession with overthrowing the Iraqi government was not shared by most other major powers. For whatever reason, this experience does not cause them to reevaluate the merits of organizing foreign policy around such an idea, but forces them to hide behind “multilateralism,” as if blunders committed by many nations together (e.g., bombing Serbia or the recognition of Kosovo) are any less damaging to international stability and peace than those done by one or a few states.