WASHINGTON >> President Barack Obama’s speech to reassure the nation on Sunday night included no new strategy to contain or defeat the Islamic State. In fact, it was not intended to.

Instead, Obama used the rare Oval Office address to make the case that his administration was ahead of the problem, not playing catch-up — contrary to the critiques presented by many of his former counterterrorism advisers.

The core of the speech talked the nation through the rationale behind a series of incremental moves his administration has made over the past month: the Pentagon’s decision to send Special Operations forces to Iraq and Syria; the long-awaited decision to launch airstrikes on the oil tanker trucks that provide the extremists with much of their revenue; and Secretary of State John Kerry’s high-wire diplomatic gamble, called the “Vienna process,” to obtain a cease-fire and a political process to halt the civil war in Syria so that all parties can focus on a common enemy.

In the end, though, the speech on Sunday was largely a plea for patience and for national unity against a threat that seemed distant and disorganized a year ago, even inside the White House.

The question now is whether the rising tempo of attacks carried out or inspired by the Islamic State — from the savagery of Paris to the killings in San Bernardino, Calif. — will continue to outpace the Obama administration’s ability to ramp up a national response.

Inside the administration, several of Obama’s advisers have pushed for the president to move more quickly to signal a major response, in hopes that it would reassure allies and prompt them to do the same. But there is also a brittleness about the critique that Obama has moved too slowly.

“Yes, there is a strategy,” Kerry snapped at a questioner the other day.

Many of the advisers Obama surrounded himself with in his first term have their doubts. Hours before the president spoke, Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and the leading contender for the Democratic nomination for president, made a passionate argument that the United States needed to move faster to get its Special Operations forces in place and to block Islamic jihadists from social media networks, which they use to spread their ideology.

“They are now the most effective recruiters in the world,” Clinton said, making the case for a crackdown on the militants’ access to Facebook, YouTube and Snapchat. She argued for a no-fly zone to speed the downfall of Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, and jabbed the White House by pressing officials to deploy the previously announced Special Operations forces in place, rather than just announcing that they would be deployed.

But in the past few weeks, the argument that Obama has moved too incrementally has come from some of his closest former counterterrorism advisers. Michael G. Vickers, who ran counterterrorism operations at the Pentagon until April this year, wrote in Politico just before Thanksgiving that “by any measure, our strategy in Iraq and Syria is not succeeding, or is not succeeding fast enough.”

He added, “We are playing a long game, when a more rapid and disruptive strategy is required.”

Vickers argued that in the two months it took the United States to drive al-Qaida out of Afghanistan in 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, it conducted as many airstrikes as the Air Force has in the past 16 months in Iraq and Syria. (Overall, the number of coalition airstrikes in Syria doubled in November from the previous month, to 234 from 117. But that is only an average of eight strikes a day.)

Michael J. Morell, the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has argued that the pace of attacks on the top leadership of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, must also be increased drastically. “It’s got to be one or two a week,” he said recently, “not just one or two every three or four months.”

Inside the Situation Room, others have made similar critiques. Kerry has repeatedly urged more military pressure, administration officials say.

Obama’s response to his critics is straightforward: “Typically, the things they suggest need to be done are things we are already doing,” he said recently.

In some cases, he is clearly correct. The announcement by the secretary of defense, Ashton B. Carter, that he was inserting an “expeditionary targeting force” into Iraq to conduct raids on the Islamic State leadership — which came 48 hours before the San Bernardino attack — was clearly intended to force the Islamic State on its heels.

The objective, Carter said at Harvard last week, was “to make ISIL wonder when they go to bed at night who’s going to be coming through that window.”

But a central hole in the strategy remains: Carter and others concede that the battle against the Islamic State cannot be won without forces on the ground. Yet sufficient non-American forces have not materialized, and no one has convincingly explained who will provide them.

Obama is known for caution when it comes to placing troops in harm’s way, and he made clear his concerns on the matter during his speech on Sunday. The lesson of his presidency, and of the one before his, was that an American occupying force breeds resentment and plays to “what groups like ISIL want.”

“The strategy that we are using now — airstrikes, Special Forces and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory,” Obama said toward the end of his speech.

Obama is acutely aware that the gains made during the administration of George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan proved unsustainable. That is why he has moved step by step, seeking not to overcommit the United States but to make sure he is in lock step with allies.

But he is also cognizant of the criticism that he is cautious to a fault, and he bristles when he hears the line from pundits that he has “overlearned” the errors of the Bush administration. He took a direct shot back at the Republican candidates who have sounded muscular (but who are largely missing detailed strategies that seem more likely to succeed) when he said on Sunday, “Our success won’t depend on tough talk or abandoning our values or giving in to fear.”

He is, in essence, arguing that a long game is the only game, since once the Islamic State is defeated, some other extremist group will most likely rise in its place.