Talk about a much-anticipated speech.

President Obama is going to speak Wednesday about his planned strategy for “degrading, defeating and destroying” the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

In that speech, the president is going to lay out a plan that will preclude American “boots on the ground.” What he will need to explain — and he’ll need to use his tremendous rhetorical skill to do so — is how this nation is going to defeat ISIL’s efforts to overthrow the government in Syria without aligning ourselves with the government that we also hate.

The president offered a hint of that strategy this morning in an interview broadcast on Meet the Press. He talked to new MTP moderator Chuck Todd about working with “moderate opposition forces” that also are fighting the regime of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. ISIL is the new enemy on the battlefield in Syria, he said, and the United States will deploy its enormous air power to hit ISIL’s whenever and wherever we find it.

This, I submit, is where the equation gets very tricky.

Assad’s regime is as hated as any in the Middle East. He, too, is a monster who needs to go. ISIL, though, is an even worse monster. Do we take sides in this struggle, wishing for one enemy force to defeat another enemy force?

Obama said the aim ought to be to help those so-called moderates in Syria — with help from other Sunni Arab states in the region. He mentioned Saudi Arabia and Jordan, two nations that have received significant U.S. military support over the years.

It’s time, Obama said, for those nations to deploy the assets we’ve provided for them in the fight against ISIL.

The president took a lot of heat when he said recently that “we don’t have a strategy yet” in dealing with ISIL. The critics who pounded Obama over that statement forget the “yet” part of that statement.

It appears a strategy is forthcoming. I’ll wait with interest for what the president has to say.

I will be particularly interested in hearing how he plans to keep fighting Bashar al-Assad while destroying the dictator’s No. 1 enemy.