CAIRO -- Six years ago, U.S. President Barack Obama trumpeted a "new beginning" of America's engagement with the Muslim world and conjured up a vision of peace in the Middle East.
Six years later, the chronically troubled region remains a mess, even messier than before, with the prospect of peace fading further away and the erstwhile grandiloquence sounding like sleep talk nowadays.
Terrorism and violence have flared up and been wreaking great havoc. The Islamic State (IS) is gaining an ever stronger and larger foothold in Iraq and Syria, civil wars in Syria and Yemen have exacted a catastrophic humanitarian toll, and Israeli-Palestinian peace is as elusive as ever.
Many factors contributed, but Obama has no one to blame but himself. His country, which has long been a formidable player in the Middle East, is at the root of the dire situation of the region.
For example, after the United States toppled Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003, it did not bother to bridge -- and even helped widen -- the divide between the Shiites and the Sunnis, and the rift is now one of the main reasons behind the IS' rampancy.
The Obama administration's Middle East policy failed largely because he wanted too much in return but was willing to commit too little.
Leading a loose anti-IS coalition, Washington has only pledged air power and weaponry assistance, because Obama understands that an air war is politically safe.
In Syria, the Obama administration wants to kill two birds with one stone: the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad and the defeat of the IS. Thus he has refused to cooperate with the Syrian government and chosen to arm Syria's ragtag rebels.
Such a self-serving and Machiavellian approach, on the one hand, has allowed extremism and terrorism larger room to breed and fester. On the other, it smacks more of opportunism than of idealism.
Whenever it comes to a decision that requires Obama to show real political courage to face hard facts, he has uniformly flinched.
Therefore, whoever is going to succeed Obama needs to know that the United State should fundamentally recalibrate its involvement in the tumultuous Middle East, and formulate a more effective policy to clear a mess of America's own making.
