The United States has suffered from a deliberate fuzziness in formulating its objectives in the Russian war in Ukraine. Flaccid phrases like “helping Ukraine defend itself” or, even worse, “putting Ukraine in the best possible position for negotiations” are either meaningless or insipid. Bureaucratic mental fog is masquerading as artful policy, and it is dangerous. Strategy is the matching of means to ends. In war it is easy to become obsessed with action rather than purpose, and thereby to fall into Nietzsche’s famous description of the most common human stupidity: forgetting what one intended to do in the first place.