The fall of Ramadi and Palmyra within a week of each other came as a shock because the month before Iraqi forces had managed to retake Tikrit, and Western leaders believed a tide had been turned in the campaign. Now a third front is opening as Obama’s disastrous Libya intervention has paved the way for ISIS to seize ground there. A predictable pattern of semi-intervention has emerged under Obama, revealing an unwillingness to engage with the messy decisions of foreign policy. The president will not commit US ground forces to secure territory and assist local forces in the maintenance of order. Hence his reliance on limited aerial intervention in Libya, Iraq and Syria. The effect has been to create chaos on the ground and a power vacuum that is being filled by Islamist forces.

This year’s events have revealed that Obama has no will to seriously tackle ISIS. Even as Ramadi fell, the White House continued to insist on the success of its strategy. When questioned on the effectiveness of the campaign its repeated response was to offer a misleading binary choice between full-scale invasion of Iraq or its current limited strategy. Obama appeals to populist anti-war sentiment while his military activity hides the reality that his strategy is designed to contain ISIS until the next president takes over. This was perhaps explicable in political terms before his re-election as president in 2012. However, in his second term it is a cynical dereliction of moral duty and a strategic folly. Apart from an emboldened Iran, his legacy in the Middle East may well be the establishment of a caliphate and a region on the brink of sectarian war. It is fast approaching the point at which a failure by the US to engage seriously with the threat from ISIS cannot be reversed.

The White House’s real military commitment can be measured quite starkly. In the month before Ramadi fell, the US flew 165 air strike sorties. To put this in perspective, the US flew almost that many every day during the Kosovo campaign of the late 1990s. Operation Desert Storm saw 42,600 strike sorties in a little over a month. Even by Obama’s own parameters for engagement he is doing very little. It is hardly surprising that the situation on the ground is deteriorating. Iraqi forces flee their positions because on the ground White House spin can’t obscure the advancing black flags of ISIS.

“Degrade and destroy” were the words that Obama used last September to announce his ISIS strategy. It was a surprise announcement from a president who had made clear the previous day that he had didn’t want to “put the cart before the horse”; in other words that he didn’t have a strategy. The words were meant to sound considered and decisive. The awkward use of “degrade” as a transitive verb should have signalled the lack of a logical endpoint for the strategy. This is really the key to understanding Obama’s position. He cannot express a strategy because he is not working towards a significant political endpoint for either Iraq or Syria.

The grotesque irony is that Obama, by his own measure, will leave Iraq in a worse security situation than when he decided to pull out US troops in 2011. As he said at that time, “We are leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq.” He was correct. The military surge had quelled, although not destroyed, the insurgency. In the UK and the US, the Left is quick to blame the 2003 Iraq war for the rise of ISIS, again drawing the logically flawed line of continuity from al-Qaeda in Iraq to ISIS. The rise of ISIS during former President al-Maliki’s divisive time in office was qualitatively different to the al-Qaeda in Iraq insurgency directed at the US. ISIS is fundamentally concerned with the creation of an alternative, theocratic state exploiting Sunni grievances. Today, Iraq is largely divided between Iranian influence and ISIS-controlled territory. This outcome was largely predictable and avoidable. There was no compulsion for the US to quit Iraq completely in 2011. It was Obama’s choice. Whatever chance there was for a state to emerge was stifled. The failure to follow through with a “diplomatic surge” only hastened the descent into political disenfranchisement quickly followed by sectarian violence.