WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama will address the nation at 9 p.m. Wednesday about how the United States plans to confront the threat from the Sunni extremist group the Islamic State.
In the speech, Obama is expected to lay out a strategy for "degrading and ultimately destroying the terrorist group," Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.
The decision to schedule the address during prime time, from the state floor of the White House, underscores the gravity of the challenge from the Islamic State group. It comes after an intense internal debate and diplomatic outreach to assemble a coalition to target the Islamic State.
Obama planned to meet with Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate on Tuesday afternoon to build congressional support for his action. On Monday evening, he and Vice President Joe Biden invited nine foreign-policy experts to a three-hour dinner to preview his policy.
Obama, who was also joined by Secretary of State John Kerry and other senior officials, looked "forward to engaging with this group and hearing their views on a range of national security and foreign policy issues," the White House said in a statement.
But the purpose of the gathering seemed more for Obama to give his guests, several of whom are fixtures on television talk shows and op-ed pages, a preview of the plan for confronting the threat from the Islamic State group, a plan he has promised to reveal Wednesday.
The White House has said little about the details of Obama's speech, which officials said was still being written. But the carefully orchestrated buildup underscored the stakes for a president who was criticized for confessing two weeks ago that he did not have a strategy for dealing with the militants in Syria.
The guest list, which included national security advisers to three former presidents from both parties, represented a full range of views about the risks of returning to Iraq.
Two of the guests - Stephen J. Hadley and Richard N. Haass - worked for the George W. Bush administration and have direct experience with the Iraq War and its chaotic aftermath. Hadley was national security adviser to Bush in 2007, when his administration undertook the troop surge in Iraq. Haass was director of policy planning at the State Department during preparations for the war in 2003.
Now the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Haass recently criticized what he views as Obama's overstretched foreign policy.
"There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy," he said. "The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago."
Two of the other guests, Samuel R. Berger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, advised Democratic presidents during foreign crises: Berger, while Bill Clinton was weighing airstrikes in Bosnia and Kosovo; Brzezinski, while Jimmy Carter was dealing with the Iran hostage crisis.
Obama also invited three veterans of his administration who were involved in counterterrorism policy: Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser; Michele Flournoy, the former No. 2 official at the Pentagon; and Michael J. Morell, a former deputy CIA director.
Rounding out the table were Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution, who served in Clinton's State Department, and Jane Harman, a former Democratic congresswoman from California who now runs the Woodrow Wilson Center. Harman criticized Obama last week for not making a public statement immediately after the beheading of the second U.S. journalist, Steven J. Sotloff, by an Islamic State militant.
"I think it's time for him to say more and do more," she said on CNN.