Good evening.

The show begins tonight in Paris where the president of France,

Emmanuel McCrown, got everyone's attention by speculating that troops,

perhaps NATO, perhaps French,

troops may be needed in Ukraine.

Olaf Schulz the Chancellor, the Germans

answered immediately, no, no NATO, no troops.

The debate is underway.

I speak with Judy Dempsey also about the next Secretary General of the NATO

organization right now, Yenne Stoltenberg, has been extended a year, but Judy votes

for eastern flank, that is the Baltics or Poland, or Finland, someone on the front line against the Russian Federation.

Then Mary Kessel joins to talk about Washington and NATO, the defense of NATO, the complaints in Washington that NATO does not

represent fairly the distribution of defensive spending.

That seems to be the issue.

The origins of NATO's treaty of 1947.

It was an ambition to construct a bulwark in some fashion against the second war, the first war breaking out again.

North American, North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The US was in the lead. France and Germany, France and

Italy and Germany and in England, some Allied, some axis, were in ruins. There was no push to have them manufacture and the

U.S. had the weaponry and carried the war, the arsenal of democracy. Well all all these decades later, the U.S. is

still carrying the burden. The Europeans are no longer in tatters and therefore

they're increasing their defense expenditure, they're building their infrastructure,

...