It was not until the early part of this year that Obama revealed the faulty logic that underpinned his “degrade and destroy” strategy for ISIS when he said: “Ultimately these terrorist organisations will be defeated because they don’t have a vision that appeals to people. . . . ISIL can talk about setting up a new caliphate, but nobody is under any illusions that they can actually in a sustained way feed people or educate people or organise a society that would work.”

Obama had used the same linguistic constructions to express a similar faith in popular change, fuelled by social media, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Arab world. This is both a temporal misunderstanding and a misreading of ISIS’s ability to function. How long is “ultimately” and how long can a state govern in an “unsustainable” way? These are questions that Obama cannot answer.

The answer seems to be that his strategy is effectively a version of containment, the US’s Cold War staple. As he sees it, the US only needs limited military involvement to prevent the spread of ISIS because it will eventually implode under the weight of its own brutality. This approach rests upon a dangerous misreading of ISIS. Like most other Western leaders, Obama has failed to understand ISIS as a politically durable entity and also the remarkable resurgence of repressive regimes in the region, even in the wake of the Arab Spring. One only has to remember the bloody suppression of the so-called “Green Revolution” in Iran after the 2009 presidential election to see the limits of popular democratic movements. Equally, Obama’s reluctance to imagine a desirable or achievable endpoint for either Iraq or Syria makes battling ISIS in a coherent way all but impossible. He does not imagine an endpoint because he is desperate to avoid the American imperialist label that bedevilled his predecessor.

It is ironic then that Obama’s folly is to project his worldview and values onto the entire region in a form of undifferentiated cultural naiveté. These were the assumptions which announced his Middle East policy in Cairo and were repeated in Jerusalem in 2013: “Four years ago, I stood in Cairo in front of an audience of young people — politically, religiously, I believe that they must seem a world away. But the things they want, they’re not so different from what the young people here want. They want the ability to make their own decisions and to get an education, get a good job, to worship God in their own way.” This may well be true for large groups of people in the Middle East (as the Arab Spring initially suggested) but not everyone has embraced Western values. Obama has confused modernisation with Westernisation because he cannot fundamentally appreciate a worldview that doesn’t ultimately end in democracy. Yet this is the one thing shared by the regimes in Tehran, Damascus and ISIS.

Obama’s fantasy about Iran becoming a thriving democracy, sharing political responsibility in the region, and his insistence that ISIS is not about Islam are not only naive but dangerous. There is no reason to assume that Iran’s return to the international fold and ensuing economic growth will lead to it becoming a democracy. There is every reason to assume that a more economically powerful Iran will pursue a nationalist agenda. Indeed, the evidence that many Iranians support a more secular state does not counter a theocracy specifically designed to resist reform. In other words, political change would probably require another popular revolution and Obama’s recent diplomacy makes that less, rather than more, likely.

Equally, ISIS has drawn considerable strength from the two interrelated acts that Obama sees as its greatest weakness. The mixture of extreme violence and the holding of territory have represented a wildly effective reengineering of both the narrative and strategy of Islamism. This is a significant contrast with al-Qaeda. Although seemingly reliant on existing jihadist tropes, ISIS’s propaganda machine inverts al-Qaeda’s narrative of Western subjugation of Islam and the caliphate as a distant, future objective. Instead, it stakes everything on current victory, the holding of territory and the declaration of a caliphate now. In that sense, Obama’s strategy of containment would actually represent a considerable victory for ISIS — de facto recognition of its territorial integrity.