CAIRO, June 4 -- When U.S. President Barack Obama stood before students and faculties of Cairo University in Egypt exactly six years ago, he envisioned America's "new beginning" with the Muslim world and peace in the Middle East, which, however, proved to be a mere mythical bubble nowadays.

Back then, Obama spoke so eloquently that it seemed all would be within his reach.

Nevertheless, with only 18 months left before Obama hands over power to his successor, the United States is struggling with an even more complicated situation in the region than what he inherited when he assumed the presidency. The prospect for the Middle East peace is running record deficit.

Across the most troubled part of the world, terrorism and violence have wreaked great havoc: the Islamic State (IS) is gaining an ever stronger foothold that straddles both Iraq and Syria, and is expanding into other countries like Libya and Saudi Arabia; civil wars in Syria and Yemen have exacted a catastrophic humanitarian toll; and peace between Israel and Palestine is as elusive as ever.

Obama should blame the political mess on no one but his crippled and cost-conscious Middle East policy. He has failed largely because the U.S. leader wants too much in return, but is willing to commit too little.

Leading a loose anti-IS coalition, the Obama administration has only pledged air power and weaponry assistance, and counted on the Iraqi security forces, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters and Syria's rebel factions to fight the bloody ground battles.

The recent twin setbacks in the Iraqi city of Ramadi and Syria's ancient town of Palmyra in the fight against IS combatants have shown that, without strong ground forces, the final defeat of the extremists could only be empty talk.

However, Obama has his own logic. He understands that an air war is politically safe. For the past 10 years, the United States has spent billions of U.S. dollars and lost some 4,500 soldiers to fight a wrong war in Iraq.

Ending the widely-detested war is Obama's campaign promise when he ran for presidency, and sending troops back to the quagmire in Iraq would be politically suicidal for him and for his Democratic Party that is facing a new round of elections.

Offering half-hearted support, U.S. defense chief Ash Carter nevertheless blamed the fall of Ramadi on Iraqi soldiers' unwillingness to fight, but he did not mention what the root cause is for the Iraqi army's frustratingly low level of morale and combat readiness despite the fact that they vastly outnumbered the IS forces.

The wide sectarian divide in the army and the country Washington helped amplify are the most to be blamed.

When the United States overran Baghdad and toppled former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in 2003, it disbanded the old regime's armed forces and oversaw the buildup of a new military by marginalizing and dismissing a large number of elite Sunni Muslim officers.

Thus, Shiite-majority Iraqi forces are understandably reluctant and unenthusiastic to defend such a Sunni-populated city as Ramadi.

Although Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi wants to bridge the sectarian divide, many, including the Americans, believe that he is too weak to do that. Yet the Obama administration has so far neither the appetite nor effective remedies to step in.

In Syria, the IS militants are now believed to be in a comfortable control of half of the nation's territory, and very likely to grab more as they are facing even weaker counter-forces than in Iraq.

Syrian President Bashar Assad and his army are now overstretched on two fronts, fighting the extremists and various rebel groups at the same time. That is precisely what Washington and its European and Gulf allies have orchestrated.

Ideally, the Obama administration wants two goals to be reached simultaneously in Syria: one is to oust Assad from power, and the other is the defeat of IS elements. To make that happen, it keeps Syria outside the anti-IS coalition, and continues to arm the Syrian rebels.

Washington has an annoying history of betting the wrong horses, and so does it this time. The Syrian opposition forces have long been weak and disorganized, and in the foreseeable future, it is highly improbable that the rebel fighters could reinvent themselves, even under the U.S. guidance. In the end, it is the former al-Qaida branch that would benefit from the mess in Syria.

In fact, Obama and his national security team are well aware how ineffective their Syrian strategy would be. Earlier, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hinted that Washington is entertaining the possibility to have direct talks with Assad.

However, Washington has since then done nothing to alter its official positions as it worries that negotiating with the Syrian leader would alienate itself away from its allies. Moreover, the U.S. president refuses to do things that could easily yield to his political opponents who would grab every opportunity to portray him as being soft on "dictators," even if it means prolonging the four-year old civil war, and more loss of innocent Syrians.

The long-stalled peace process between Israel and Palestine is another debacle for the Obama administration. It is never a secret that Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have ice-cold relations. The two leaders simply have no trust in each other, and bear mutual grudges on a number of things.

Upon taking office, the president urged Israel to completely suspend new settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and set it a key condition for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. That was met with stubborn Israeli rejection.

A possible nuclear deal with Iran has only made relations between the United States and Israel from bad to worse.

Netanyahu insisted on attacking the nuclear agreement the world powers and Iran are negotiating, saying it has done not enough to dismantle Iran's nuclear infrastructure.

He has even gone behind the back of the White House, and taken the advantage of U.S. domestic politics by accepting congressional Republicans' invitation to exaggerate Iran's nuclear threat before the U.S. Congress. The Obama administration has literally been enraged.

Now that Netanyahu has won a new term to lead a full right-wing Israeli government, while Obama has basically become a lame duck, the prospect for renewing peace talks between Israel and Palestine during the remainder of Obama's presidency could not be slimmer.

Like his many predecessors, Obama was once very ambitious to find a viable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is noted that he has earlier threatened to stop defending Israel at the United Nations. Yet, considering Israel's strong lobbying power among the beltway politicians, and a coming presidential race, it remains dubious that the White House is willing to cross the domestic political red line, and act tougher on its staunchest ally in the Middle East.

Apart from all the twists and turns, the imminent Iranian nuclear deal is perhaps the only thing that can be listed as one of the administration's limited number of major diplomatic legacies.

To secure such a deal, the White House has maneuvered to face off obstructions of a Republican-controlled congress and mounting skepticism from its allies in the Middle East. Yet it has made a strategic error from the very beginning.

While negotiating with Iran over the past more than a year, Washington has simply ruled out any moves to improve bilateral ties with Tehran. That is partly because the two countries have in the past piled up too much enmities, hatred and distrust toward each other.

The reason why the talks, no matter how hard they are, have not collapsed is that Obama wants to build up his legacy, while Iran seeks to get rid of the sanctions that have overwhelmed its national economy, nothing more and nothing less.

Yet, without a normalized U.S.-Iran relationship, it would be premature to believe that the deal itself could solve the nuclear problem once and for all.

At a recent Camp David summit between the United States and the Gulf nations, Obama was trying to reassure its traditional allies that his country is determined to defend their interests. Yet only two members of the Gulf Cooperation Council sent their heads of state, a self-evident sign of discord.

The Saudi-led air campaign against Yemen's Shiite Houthi fighters is another proof that the kings, emirs and sheikhs are gradually drifting away from Washington.

By gathering a coalition and bombing the Iran-backed Houthis, Riyadh is trying to flex its muscles and tell its U.S. friends that if they do not help it contain what it perceives as Iran's expansion in the region, it can still finish the job by itself.

Honestly speaking, the world is somewhat fortunate to see a U.S. president who is reluctant to employ military forces in the greater Middle East. However, this U.S. leader, unlike former U.S. President George W. Bush who had never hesitated to display America's military might, likes to stay behind the scene and pull the strings.

From the very beginning, Obama's Middle East strategy is doomed to fail because he is more of an opportunist than an idealist. Whenever it comes to the decision that takes real political courage to face the cold-hard facts, he has uniformly flinched and flip-flopped.

Therefore, whoever is going to succeed the Obama administration needs to know that the United State should not continue to scale back its involvement in the tumultuous Middle East at a time when he or she ought to do more to clear a mess of America's own making.