At Madeleine Albright’s funeral last week, former President Bill Clinton recalled one of his last conversations with the former secretary of state. A refugee first from the Nazis and then from Soviet tyranny who arrived on America’s shores as an 11-year-old, Albright was a forceful advocate for the defense of democracy at home and freedom abroad, and she was plenty worried about both. Asked about her health, Albright told Clinton, “Let’s don’t waste any time on that. The only thing that really matters is what kind of world we’re going to leave our grandchildren.”

In his eulogy of Albright, President Joe Biden once again purposefully described America’s circumstances as an “inflection point,” and he is dead right about that. He finds himself called upon to steer America through three overlapping existential challenges, all occurring simultaneously, each making the others more difficult and more dangerous.

One is a still-unsolved pandemic that has killed one million Americans in a little over two years and has turned American society and the American economy upside down. Another is the growing strength of antidemocratic and even neo-fascist forces within our own country, more vast and more open than America has ever experienced, coddled and actually embraced by a Republican Party supported by half of Americans. The last is the invasion of a European ally by a nuclear-armed Russia guilty of crimes against humanity on a scale not seen in Europe since Adolf Hitler’s last moments in a Bavarian bunker, led by a power-hungry dictator who threatens the world with nuclear war if he doesn’t get to conquer a sovereign nation.

While keeping America’s recovery from COVID-19 on track and reminding a divided America what being a democracy means, Biden’s burden is to ensure that America doesn’t succumb to weariness or a wandering attention span when it comes to Ukraine, and that our commitment to do what it takes to help Ukrainians defeat Russia doesn’t flag.

The president’s announcement of a new $33 billion military and economic aid package for Ukraine served multiple purposes. First and foremost, the Ukrainians desperately need it: Defending themselves against Russia’s onslaught consumes huge amounts of weaponry, while the invasion has destroyed their infrastructure and their economy. American support determines whether the Ukrainians are overrun or not. Second, the aid package is a crucial message to Russia that America will stand by Ukraine’s side for as long as it takes. Third, it spurs our European allies to do more of what we, and they, have been doing: keeping the arms and the financial assistance pouring into Ukraine, and reinforcing both the aid itself and the message to Moscow.

Biden put it plainly. “The cost of the fight is not cheap,” he said in announcing his request for additional funding. “But caving to aggression is going to be costly if we allow it to happen. We either back the Ukrainian people as they defend their country, or we stand by as the Russians continue their atrocities and aggression in Ukraine.”

The challenges that Biden faces rank right up there with those faced by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. Like them, Biden is hectored by pundits and partisans who will be remembered for being demagogues or fruitcakes, or not remembered at all. Like Lincoln and Roosevelt, for all the venom directed Biden’s way, he is meeting the challenges with steadiness and the warranted sense of the grave responsibility he bears.

Madeleine Albright, may she rest in peace, could not have put it any better than Biden did last week. Vladimir Putin’s attempts to split the European allies, split America from Europe and split Americans in order to achieve his designs in Ukraine haven’t worked thus far. There’s no better way to honor Albright’s legacy than to make sure they never do.

Jeff Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment, he is a longtime columnist for the Boston Herald, writing on politics, national security, human rights and the Mideast.