Welcome to Beg to Beg to Differ, The Bull Works 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 Niskanin Center, and Damon Linker, who writes the Sub newsletter, Eyes on the Right.

Our special guest this week is Noah Smith, who also has a sub-stack newsletter.

His is called No Opinion.

Nice little pun.

So welcome to one and all.

We narrowly avoided it seems a really damaging rail strike.

It looked until Thursday morning as if that was a real possibility

for the first time in 30 years. So credit to President Biden for you know working the phones and seemingly averting that what

would have been I think it's safe to say pretty much a disaster for the

economy if it had lasted any length of time.

So that frees us up to turn our attention abroad

and to Ukraine.

And their fabulous breakthrough.

They did a counter-offensive Ukrainian army

east of Kharkiv, and also made progress in the south

toward Khersong and gave hope and a glimmer of optimism to freedom-loving people around the world.

Noah Smith, I'm going to start with you. You had a long post about this and I'd like you to just set the stage of why you believe this war is important for liberalism and the free world?

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