President Obama “has to avoid the risk of talking about what he will not do and what America will not do,” says Steve Bucci, a former top Pentagon official and a director at The Heritage Foundation. “We have to get the message across that we are going to stand firm against ISIS, that it is going to be with international support … and he needs to avoid putting a timeline on it.”
Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner, a former adviser to former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, also weighed in on the speech, remarking that, “the international community wants to see real leadership from the United States.”