Welcome to Beg to Beg to Differ, the Bulwerk's weekly roundtable discussion featuring

civil conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor of the Bullwork, and I'm joined

by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings

Institution and the Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Niskannon

Center and Demon Linker who writes the sub-stack newsletter, Eyes on the Right.

Our special guest this week is David Kramer,

executive director of the George W Bush Institute

and former Assistant Secretary of State,

Professor, and Foreign Policy, All-round Expert.

And so we are delighted to have you with us today, David Kramer, and I'm going to begin with you because you had a piece this week

along with Eric Edelman who was familiar to listeners of this podcast regarding

Ukraine's request for battle tanks.

They're getting them.

Finally, the impasse was broken apparently when President Biden agreed

that we would send Abrams tanks and this freed up Germany to then

drop its objections to the re-export of its leopards.

There's some 2,000 leopards around Europe, and it's going to send some itself.

So if you wouldn't mind, start with the debate that the Western Alliance found itself in regarding this request for tanks,

it seems like this has become a pattern in the last 11 months since the Russian invasion that Ukraine pleads for some necessary

weapon system and there's a lot of dithering on the part of the West.

...