As it is, the chances of a wider and bloodier war over Syria have grown in recent days. Syrian tanks and artillery have reportedly entered the demilitarized buffer zone near the Israeli border, in brazen violation of the 1974 disengagement agreement, as they prepare to sweep rebel forces from the rest of the border area. Israel did very little to deny its attack Monday on an air base used by Iran in central Syria, and Jerusalem is threatening more aggressive steps to keep Tehran from further entrenching itself militarily in its client state. The Iranians have vowed retaliation for the attack, which they are sure to make good on, probably via their proxies in Hezbollah. And tensions between Israel and Russia are at their highest point since the Cold War, in part because Israel did not notify Russia in advance of Monday’s attack.

So where is the United States in all of this?

As Michael Doran pointed out in an astute Times op-ed on Tuesday, Trump seems to have violated his own ostensible rules for winning in recent days. First he promised to withdraw U.S. forces, which would eliminate what little military leverage we have with Syria (and Turkey), and then he telegraphed the kind of feckless missile strike he seems intent on carrying out sometime in the coming hours or days.

But the truth about current U.S. policy is worse. For starters, there is no policy: The president and his commanding general in the Middle East, Joseph Votel, have offered flatly contradictory statements about what the U.S. intends to do in Syria. We long ago pulled the plug on supporting relatively moderate Syrian rebels fighting Bashar al-Assad. And the absence of policy itself runs counter to what is supposed to be Trump’s overarching goal of blunting Iran’s regional ambitions and forcing a renegotiation of the nuclear deal.

To adapt Churchill’s line about Russia, Trump’s approach to Syria is an impulse wrapped in indifference inside an incoherence. It makes Barack Obama’s failed Syria policy look savvy, since at least the former president’s reluctance to get involved was consonant with his overarching desire to improve relations with Tehran.

A limited missile strike that slightly degrades Assad’s military capabilities will change none of this, just as last year’s U.S. strike changed nothing. What could work? In a column I wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2013, I argued that the U.S. should target Assad and his senior lieutenants directly in a decapitation strike, just as the U.S. attempted in Iraq in 2003, and against Osama bin Laden in 2011.