Neither the American people nor posterity will be kind to the administration that cedes a victory to Moscow in Europe.

When it comes to the deteriorating international security environment, the president has a lot on his plate these days. But so does any president, and multitasking is a core competency expected of the commander in chief.

The Trump administration is understandably focused on Israel’s effort to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat — perhaps to a prohibitive degree. It will find that the United States — not the administration, but the nation and its polity — will not look kindly on a policy that results in America forgetting its obligations elsewhere on the globe.

There will be reputational costs for the United States if, for example, the administration allows Russia to run roughshod over Ukraine. That’s what Moscow is doing.

Over the course of this month, Russia has bombarded Ukrainian cities at a scale unseen since the beginning of this campaign. Dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones have rained down on Ukrainian cities for weeks. Last night’s barrage was one of the worst, but it’s all but certain to be eclipsed in the coming days.

As a result of truncated shipments of Western aid, Ukraine has had to ration its remaining stockpile of sophisticated interceptors. Kyiv is improvising, cleverly and effectively, in its effort to take down Russia’s drones before they reach their targets, but that is insufficient to spare Ukraine’s civilians from Moscow’s indiscriminate attacks on civilian infrastructure and apartment buildings.

Kyiv’s plight is, for now, on America’s back burner. Trump begged Volodymyr Zelensky’s pardon on Tuesday as he jetted away from the G-7 summit early. Circumstances in the Middle East and America’s possible direct involvement in them certainly merit the president’s prioritization. But there are additional indications that the administration has been burned by the fruitless effort to craft a cease-fire deal in Europe, and it seems inclined now to wash its hands of the crisis.

During a congressional hearing on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told lawmakers that there will be a “reduction” in the amount of aid earmarked for Ukraine in the president’s next budget. In addition, “Hegseth did not attend a meeting of tens of defense chiefs gathered to coordinate support for Ukraine earlier this month, marking the first time the U.S. Defense Secretary has not appeared at the Ukraine Defense Contact Group,” Newsweek reported. These signals dovetail with the conclusions observers might draw from the administration’s decision to quietly mothball an interagency working group tasked with devising “strategies for pressuring Russia into speeding up peace talks with Ukraine.”

If we can see all this and infer that the administration is inclined to give Moscow a free hand in Ukraine, the Kremlin can, too. Its unsparing bombardment of Ukrainian population centers suggests it has heard the message coming from Washington loud and clear.

The Trump administration might think that it can invest American capital, assets, and prestige in the effort to force Russia to climb down from its war of conquest, fail, and experience no consequences as a result of that failure. That would be a deeply flawed calculation.

“It seems to me pretty obvious that America’s reputation is on the line,” Senator Mitch McConnell observed while grilling Hegseth over the administration’s approach to the crisis in Europe — an approach that is almost Biden-esque in its schizophrenia. “We don’t want a headline at the end of this conflict that says Russia wins and America loses,” McConnell observed.

We don’t. Nor does the president want that to darken his legacy.

The hard-nosed realist set has very little use for the concept of honor in the conduct of foreign policy. Such types seem forever surprised when they discover that other countries, the American people, and even this very presidency seem to value intangible concepts like honor, fidelity, and respect. Russia is meting out a humiliation to the United States, first at the negotiating table and now over the skies of Ukraine. It would be foolish to expect the voting public not to notice, much less to not care.

Neither the American people nor posterity will be kind to the administration that cedes a victory to Moscow in Europe, and that administration can expect to own the unknowable but surely undesirable consequences that would follow.