ISIS’s strategy and the geographic path of its military campaign is neither random nor opportunistic. Its military strategy cannot be understood without an appreciation of its specific reworking of Islamic eschatology to exploit sectarianism. In a clever mix of political disenfranchisement and religious belief, ISIS transformed the democratic failings of Maliki and Assad’s iron rule into sectarian warfare. ISIS exploits early sectarian Islamic apocalyptic prophecies from previous conflicts in Iraq and the Levant. These resonate in today’s sectarian civil wars. As a result, ISIS has set out to reinforce its political strength by seizing religiously significant targets such as Dabiq, near Syria’s border with Turkey. For ISIS this will be the site of its supremacy over “Rome” (a synonym for the West) before going on to conquer Constantinople. Equally, Kobane’s importance to ISIS is a reflection of eschatological writing.

The fall of Ramadi and Palmyra should leave no doubts about ISIS’s military capability and its ability to operate on multiple fronts. It should be abundantly clear that America’s military strategy for dealing with ISIS has failed.

However, there are possible strategies for dealing with ISIS but they would require the US to increase its presence on the ground. Both strands of Obama’s current strategy should be abandoned. “Degrade” is too vague and “destroy” is too ambitious. The West’s strategy should be to defeat ISIS in much the same way that al-Qaeda in Iraq was defeated by 2011. In practical terms, this would mean that ISIS lost the ability to hold and administer territory and was, at worst, a small terrorist organisation with limited reach.

The point of a deeper understanding of ISIS is to acknowledge that it is possible to engage it with conventional military force. Because its military objectives are governed by religious and territorial imperatives its likely military response is more predictable than al-Qaeda’s insurgency ever was. Without territorial integrity ISIS loses its self-proclaimed basis for legitimacy and would be forced to fight to maintain it.

Disaggregation of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq should be the first step in such a strategy. For those who remember US military neologisms, “Af-Pak” was the last unsuccessful attempt to unify a theatre of operations around an existential threat. In this sense Obama’s implicit “Iraq first” approach is correct. First, it delegitimises ISIS’s internal logic. Second, it recognises that although the threat from ISIS is unified the situations in Iraq and Syria are each unique and require very different strategies. Containment of ISIS’s land grabs in Iraq and Syria makes no sense. Containment and parallel attempts to broker peace in what is effectively a civil war in Syria make much more sense. Currently, the Assad regime views the Western powers, rather than ISIS, as its primary antagonist. This means the US bombing campaign there is supporting an incoherent political strategy. A concentration of US power against ISIS in Iraq might force Assad and his Iranian backers to change their calculus and start fighting ISIS with a fervour currently reserved for other opposition forces.

Obama’s now infamous policy of “leading from behind” has seen him foolishly resuscitate elements of another Cold War strategy: the Nixon doctrine. Nixon’s innovation was to get Vietnam to take over its war from the US. It was a strategy replicated in the Middle East through pre-revolutionary Iran. Last December, Obama made clear that he wished to see Iran become a “very successful regional power”. The difference being that post-revolutionary Iran remains a theocracy, vocally opposed to America and her allies and decisively able to stamp out popular dissent. Yet again, Obama seems to believe appeasement will inevitably, inexplicably, lead to democracy in Tehran.