By Noah Rothman
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
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.
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