President Barack Obama will set an ambitious goal on Wednesday to cut oil imports by a third over 10 years, focusing on energy security amid high gasoline prices that could stall the U.S. economic recovery.

Obama will outline his strategy in a speech after spending days explaining U.S.-led military action in Libya, where fighting, accompanied by popular unrest elsewhere in the Arab world, has helped push gasoline prices toward $4 a gallon.

The White House says this is a deliberate turn toward energy security by Obama and will be followed by other events to highlight his strategy.

“He’ll be laying out the goal … that in a little over a decade from now we’ll reduce the amount of oil we import from the rest of the world by about a third,” a senior administration official told reporters.