When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, many in the Middle East expected a dramatic change in Washington's policy towards the region. It is now clear that those expectations were too high. Mr Obama, as a powerful and eloquent orator, vowed to revamp America's relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds after the disastrous presidency of George W Bush. But Mr Obama as president has proven to be a hard-headed political realist who is reluctant to disrupt US alliances with the region's many authoritarian rulers.
"No matter how callously defined, neither America's interests - nor the world's - are served by the denial of human aspirations," the president declared in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize. But one of the biggest disappointments of his administration so far is its failure to advance democracy and human rights, especially in the Middle East. Granted, the Obama administration inherited a decades-old US policy of supporting autocratic regimes - including Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan - in exchange for political acquiescence.
That policy seemed to change in June 2005, when the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, told the world that the US would no longer support repressive regimes in the name of keeping political stability. "For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy here in the Middle East - and we achieved neither," she said at the American University in Cairo. "Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."
For a brief period, Ms Rice's message resonated in the Arab world. It came five months after Iraqis showed extraordinary bravery by turning out in droves to vote in the parliamentary elections of January 2005. In Lebanon, a popular revolt had helped to dislodge years of Syrian military and political domination. At that moment, the US could have encouraged some genuine change in the region. But things fell apart when Washington confronted its first test: in late 2005, a small group of Egyptian judges challenged the authoritarian regime of the president, Hosni Mubarak. The US stood by silently while Mr Mubarak crushed public protests, and the Arab world understood, correctly, that Washington had given up on democracy - or had never meant what it said in the first place.
It is these contradictions between US rhetoric and actions that lead people in the Middle East to distrust the US, and to spin conspiracy theories about American motives. When the US continues to back autocrats such as Mr Mubarak against the will of their people, then it loses much of its leverage to demand reform from other repressive regimes such as Iran and Syria. And favouring stability over democratic values will come back to haunt America in the long term.
If the US has any hope of nurturing political maturity in the Arab world, it must support an independent judiciary and a free press - the institutions that help democracy to thrive. As Ms Rice herself said: "The day must come when the rule of law replaces emergency decrees, and when the independent judiciary replaces arbitrary justice. Opposition groups must be free to assemble, and to participate, and to speak to the media." But there was no action behind that lofty rhetoric.
Mr Obama also took up the soaring oratory of democracy promotion in his speech to the Muslim world last year. "America does not presume to know what is best for everyone, just as we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election," the president said in his much-anticipated address to the Arab world at Cairo University in June. "But I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn't steal from the people; the freedom to live as you choose. These are not just American ideas; they are human rights."
Since that speech, the Obama administration has been remarkably quiet on democracy promotion and reluctant to criticise US allies who fall well short of the ideals about which he spoke so eloquently in Cairo. The administration has also dropped any threat of linking future US aid to democratic reform or improvements in, for example, Egypt's human rights record (Mr Mubarak's regime receives nearly $1.8 billion a year in US assistance, making it the second-highest beneficiary of American foreign aid after Israel).
Even in Iraq, the administration remained largely silent after a parliamentary committee barred a prominent Sunni leader, Saleh al Mutlaq, from national elections in March. These policies, which Mr Obama and his aides regard as political realism, are viewed by many in the region as yet another example of the US favouring expediency over real change. Mr Obama says all the right things. But he will be judged on what his administration does, and not what it aspires to be.
Mohamad Bazzi is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a journalism professor at New York University