President Obama addressed the nation Wednesday night to outline his strategy for confronting Islamist militants in Iraq and Syria. 

The President laid out a four part plan to defeat the militant group that calls itself the Islamic State in his speech. It includes air strikes, humanitarian assistance, and counter-terrorism efforts to cut funding to the militants and stop the flow of foreign fighters in and out of the region. But President Obama also said the U.S. will support, as he put it, "forces fighting these terrorists on the ground." 

For a reaction, Doug Ollivant joined Take Two Thursday. He's a Senior National Security Fellow with the New America Foundation. 

Ollivant explained that President Obama's strategy is to create a broad coalition in the region, which will include Saudi Arabia -- the key actor, as Ollivant puts it -- and other gulf states like Turkey, Jordan and Kuwait. Even Iran, which is considered a wildcard, "could have an important role to play here."

Ollivant asserted that the President's insistence that no U.S. ground forces will be deployed in this fight will hold. "Having U.S. troops on the ground has severe negative political consequences," he said. "We're going to rely on local forces even though militarily, they're immensely inferior to a U.S. ground force, but politically, much better in the long term."