The country. In 2016, Bolton denounced Trump’s penny-wise approach to NATO for “encouraging Russian aggression.” Last year, he wrote that Russian interference in the U.S. election was “a true act of war,” and that Putin’s denials were “insulting.” This was in a newspaper op-ed titled, in part, “Negotiate with Russia at our peril.”

Those views remain true. Russia is a hostile power seeking, as Pompeo told me last year in a public interview, “to stick it to America.” Yet Trump has repeatedly gone out of his way to mollify and elevate Putin. To the extent that his administration has been tough on Russia — as with last week’s Justice Department indictments of Russian intelligence officers or March’s expulsion of 60 Russians — it has been over Trump’s personal and often furious objections.

The G.O.P.’s pro-Russia caucus, channeling Trump’s ideological id through such simpering mouthpieces as Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, continues to gain ground, with the percentage of Republican voters with a favorable view of Putin more than doubling since 2015.

Bolton and Pompeo should be leading the conservative charge against the Putin appeasers. In office, they are effectively complicit with them.

Conscience. On Wednesday, I spoke by phone with Cy Vance’s son, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., about his father’s decision to resign. “If he could not in good conscience support the president’s views publicly, he felt he had a duty to the president and the country to step away,” Vance recalls. “He went out in a very painful personal way, but faithful to his views.”

Vance adds that one of his takeaways from his father’s experience is “how important it is, if you’re going into government, to be a decision-maker for your own policies.” No adviser to a president is going to get his way all of the time, but at a minimum that adviser should be able to defend the tilt of an administration’s policy as if it were his own. If not, he should make room for those who can.

Right now, Bolton and Pompeo are parties to a Russia policy they would never otherwise advocate and cannot possibly defend in light of their public views. This means that they are either violating their principles, or had none to begin with.

If it’s the latter, by all means they should stay put and enjoy the aphrodisiac of power for however long it may last. If the former, the only decent course is to resign. The sooner they do it, the more they can preserve of their honor.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.