Peter Zeihan: What’s Really Going on in Israel – Danger Close with Jack Carr
Geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan joins Jack Carr to discuss the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas. Zeihan is an expert on Middle Eastern affairs and global trends. Through his firm Zeihan on Geopolitics, he provides analysis on demographics, geography, and geopolitics to corporations, financial institutions, agriculture, and the military. Zeihan shares his perspectives on the complex forces shaping the war between Israel and Hamas, as well as the world’s broader conflicts.
Transcript, with help from Claude-AI which lightly edited it to improve readability and identify the speakers:
Jack Carr (JC): This is the Danger Close Podcast. Beyond the Books with me, Jack Carpenter. Thank you for tuning in to the Danger Close Podcast, an Ironclad original presented by Navy Federal Credit Union. My guest today, Peter Zeihan. You might be familiar with his books, The Accidental Superpower, The Absent Superpower, Disunited Nations, and his latest, The End of the World is Just the Beginning. Or you might be familiar with his YouTube channel, Zeihan on Geopolitics, where he always offers fresh, unique, and interesting perspectives on world events. On this podcast, we discuss the ongoing situation in Israel. And now, without further ado, Peter Zeihan.
Peter Zeihan (PZ): I can only imagine what it’s like right now. Believe it or not, the Hamas stuff is usually not, I mean, everyone’s curious, but it doesn’t get to the core of what I normally do, but I know what we have a I have you for a very short amount of time so I want to dive right in and but first I want to make sure that everybody knows to follow you on social channels and subscribe to your YouTube because You walking around anywhere whether it’s Colorado or anywhere around the world and just like pausing and sometimes not even pausing you Do you need to walk? Global you know geopolitical issues with such, ease might be the wrong word, but with such clarity and conviction, the same way that you write. But as you’re like just hiking through like the tundra or something, it’s remarkable. So everybody should sign up for those and watch those whenever you drop them. Do you have a dear headgear chandelier behind you?
PZ: There it is. I am in semi-undisclosed location writing, so this is not my house. This is very Utah.
JC: It is. We do have one in our house as well, though. And it is very – well, you’re in Colorado. You must see this sort of thing.
PZ: I am.
JC: Yeah. No, I just – I haven’t been in the house long enough to be able to convince that – convince myself that this is necessary to happen, but I’m close.
JC: Maybe I’ll have to send you one. anyone uh… but uh… i wanted to talk to you obviously about what’s going on in uh… in israel hamas uh… how that ties in more globally with has a lot of ran possibly russia and the united states response uh… so what is your initial work for your initial thoughts when you first heard of the attacks on saturday
PZ: Well the single biggest deal is that uh… this should have been detected. Hamas is the group that the Israelis are most concerned about monitoring, and in theory, they have them shot through with plenty of human intelligence gathering operations, and of course, it’s right on their borders, so signals intelligence should be pretty good. And the idea that you could have conservatively 500 Hamas fighters, probably closer to 1,000, border in a surprise assault that from 20 different vectors using a half a dozen different transport methods and none of it was detected before it went down, that is an intelligence failure that is just colossal. This isn’t like 9-11 where it was some fringe group using a novel method of attack. These are all known factors and for the Israelis to miss this, I mean, at a minimum this is going to cause the downfall of the government, which a lot of people probably think is not all that bad of a thing. But it’s definitely going to cause a complete top-to-bottom overhaul of how the Israelis do everything, just like it did the last time something like this went down 50 years ago when the Israelis reformed their intelligence systems in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War and became the world standard. So somehow, somewhere in the last 20 years, it’s all falling apart. And it makes you wonder what else they’re missing.
JC: I mean there’s some parallels to us after the Cold War relying more on signals type intelligence, technical type intelligence rather than human type intelligence.
PZ: There’s pros and cons of each method, but the foes that the United States is primarily concerned about are in a different hemisphere. different hemispheres. You can understand why signals intelligence forms a stronger pillar for us. Gaza was right there.
JC: Yeah, and I mean, I don’t know if you felt this way or not, or this is your assessment or not, that the Israeli intelligence services in particular had a kind of aura of not invincibility, but a outreach, a mystery, a mystique, that they were embedded in Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran through agents, spies, proxy groups even that has been shattered perhaps with this latest incursion.
PZ: I mean, again, we don’t have any information. The most logical conclusion today, which might be proven wrong tomorrow, is that it’s a new faction within Hamas because there’s dozens of them and it could just be a new one that popped up and somehow managed to recruit several hundred people. Even that doesn’t hold together very well.
JC: Yeah.
JC: And so more geopolitically, when we talk about US, Israel, and Saudi, and an agreement that, I don’t know, on the brink is the right word, or the right terminology, but working through normalization of relations in exchange for a possibly increased oil production and decreased oil prices, and maybe some military support also for Saudi in a kind of a reorganization of the order in the Middle East. How much did that play into what happened over the weekend?
PZ: If I was a guessing man, I would say that that was the primary rationale for the timing, if not the attack itself, definitely for the brutality as well. You’re looking at things that Hamas has now done in the last week that even ISIS never got around to doing in terms of just the human denigration. And so it’s gonna be very, very difficult for the folks in Riyadh to still proceed to cut a deal with Israel. Now, for those of you who don’t like live and breathe this area, quick primer. There are lots and lots and lots of factions across the Middle East, but there’s really four that matter. You’ve got the Turks, different ethnicity, but Sunni Muslim, semi-secular. You’ve got the Sunnis, which Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Egypt, that’s the dominant group, Sunni Arabs. The third group are the Israelis, the Jews, and then the fourth are Shia, Persians, so different religious sect, different ethnicity, and that’s Iran. And what has been going on for the last, let’s call it a decade, but really intensely started in the second year of the Trump administration was a normalization of the relationship between the second and the third factions. The Sunni Arabs that make up the vast majority and the vast majority of the economy and then the Jews who have the technology and the relationship with the United States. And the ideal was that if you can get those two factions on the same side then the rest of the Middle East will more or less take care of itself. Now there are any number of ways that you can manage the Middle East. This is one, I’m not saying it’s better or worse than any particular one, but this is the one that the Biden and the Trump administrations broadly agreed on behind closed doors. They will never say that out loud, but it’s a by administration strategy. And the United Arab Emirates and Morocco have already gone down that path. And the question was whether Saudi Arabia, the biggest, most powerful, the richest of the Sunni states, would follow. And within Riyadh, there is a familial argument. I mean, we all know about those intergenerational arguments we have at family reunions, where all the aunts and the uncles and the parents are on one side and all the cousins and the kids are on the other side, and it doesn’t matter how old you are, those arguments really don’t change. Well, for the older generation, the defining characteristics of the arab identity is that the palestinians are eric’s too and so any sort of deal that is struck with anyone has to at least pay homage to the idea that the palestinians should be able to control their own territory but the next generation down led by a muslim bids are muhammad bin salman excuse me uh… who’s a millennial is like whatever that’s your problem old man uh… palestinians have never done anything for us uh… gaza’s an open air prison camp even if we wanted to do something with it we couldn’t with all of our money so just let it rot and let’s have a deal with the power that matters and that’s israel and that will usher in a new middle east where we lead the entire arab world against iran now that might be a little over optimistic it’s not ridiculous. So what’s going on in Riyadh right now is the older generation, which includes the king, and the younger generation, which includes the king apparent, are fighting about it. And we will know within a month who comes out on top based on what the Saudi position is versus Iran and Hamas.
JC: TBD.
JC: Do you think that alliance, for lack of a better term, U.S., Israel, Saudi, that kind of trilateral type of relationship is, would it be beneficial to order in that part of the world?
PZ: The word order is a little loaded. It would consolidate a certain side and something to remember with all of us is these two countries started this without us. When we made it very clear that we weren’t thrilled with the Israelis for things they were doing in the occupied territories, we withdrew some military support and we did the same for the Saudis for what they were doing in their own region. And so the Israelis and the Saudis for about 15 years now have been playing the United States off of them each other and in doing so have gotten more weapons and more technology and more funding than we would have normally generated with the Israelis providing military training for the Saudis and the Saudis providing intelligence on Iran for the Israelis. They already have de facto a fairly robust bilateral relationship. The question is whether the United States feels that needs to have an active role in that. So our role in these talks have mostly been hand-holding. This isn’t like discussions between us and the Iranians where we don’t meet directly and the Swiss have to run back and forth with messages. We’re kind of the third wheel here.
JC: Interesting. And then when we talk about, let’s look at another kind of trilateral relationship. Russia, Iran, China. What does that look like?
PZ: Well, let’s start with the bigger two players. The Chinese and the Russians do not like one another. It’s an alliance of convenience and the standing Russian position is that if the Chinese ever cross the border into Siberia, that the Russians won’t meet them with tanks and troops, they’ll just nuke them. And when that is kind of like the basis of the relationship, you can imagine how much trust there is. They don’t like each other. It’s a marriage of convenience at the time. The Chinese really, really, really are enjoying the stalemate that has erupted in the Ukraine war because it means everybody’s eyes are over there rather than on China. And that’s convenient. And it’s in many ways the flip of what the Russian position was when the Americans were facing off against the Chinese during the Trump administration. They were like, hey, this is great. We can start moving things into play to grab territory we want while the Americans are focused over there. So there is absolutely no love lost. Alliance of convenience. That doesn’t mean irrelevant. It’s just if circumstances evolve, they will stab each other in the back at seconds. Iran doesn’t get along with either the Russians or the Chinese nearly as well as they get along with one another. The Iranians have fought any number of wars over the Caucasus. And whenever Azerbaijan decides to get a little uppity, the Iranians get really pissed off. Because for the Russians, the Azerbaijanis are not a threat. They’re small. They’re remote. There’s some arguments over energy transport policy, but nothing really that cuts to the core of Moscow’s interests. But the single largest minority in Azerbaijan—or excuse me, the single largest minority in Iran are Azerbaijanis. And so the very existence of an independent Azerbaijan, Iran sees as a threat. And now that the Russians are pulling out of the Caucasus, and Azerbaijan is taking the fight to Armenia, for Russia, they always knew they were going to sell out their Armenians. But for the Iranians, this is like the last brick in the wall breaking away to generate what they’re fearing is going to be an irredentist Azerbaijan right on their doorstep with unofficial Russian blessing. So any collaboration between the Russians and the Iranians is through clenched teeth. It’s not that the two players don’t see a reason to cooperate. This area is messy. Everyone has been an ally or an enemy at one time or another or both. But there’s no love there. And the Iranians are fully aware that in the Russian eyes, at best, they’re a distraction to be used. And it’s entirely possible that today, while the Russians may, may, emphasis on the word may, have had a finger in what’s going on with Hamas, and that may be something that the Iranians are broadly in favor of, they’ll, again, sell each other out in a second if they think they can get a better deal from the United States.
JC: Interesting. I have so many questions about that. Russian fingers involvement and the how and the why. But pivoting to China, didn’t they sign a, was it two years ago, a 25 year, some sort of strategic partnership with Iran?
PZ: Yeah, whenever you see the Chinese or the Russians sign a strategic partnership, that’s the code word. That means it doesn’t mean anything.
JC: Okay. But are they the largest trading partner? Is it all crude oil?
PZ: I don’t know offhand if they’re number one. If not, they’re pretty close. But remember, Iran doesn’t trade very much. So they’ve got a much slimmed down oil portfolio and they import most of their food. And that’s about the end of the trading relationship.
JC: And when we look at the U.S. sending a carrier battle group, possibly two, into the Med as a, I think, as a sign to the Lebanon, Hezbollah, Iran to not come in from the north and not turn this thing into a broader conflict, is that the point, deterrence, or is the point being there to take advantage of the opportunity to go in and hit whatever sites we’ve been wanting to?
PZ: Oh, let me be clear. If it wasn’t for the hostage situation, the U.S. would have no interest in being anywhere near this. But one of the unofficial agreements that you make with the U.S. government, if you’re a citizen, is that no matter where you are, no matter what you’ve done, no matter your crimes, we will come for you. And as soon as we know where those hostages are, we will go in hard. We will not subcontract that out to a third party. And that’s why the carrier is in place. And that’s the only reason the carrier is in place. People like to say, oh, this is a deterrent for Hezbollah, but we’re not gonna get involved in that because it’s not the sort of situation that a carrier can fix. If you want to root out Hezbollah, very different circumstances from Hamas. Hamas is several thousand, several tens of thousands, several hundred thousand, don’t know what the number is, among a densely populated open-air prison of three million people and going door-to-door to through that to clear it out, even if we threw the entire US military at that, that would not be enough for that job So I do not envy what’s in front of the Israelis or in front of the Palestinians on that front There is no way that is going to be anything but hideous Lebanon actually has terrain It’s mountainous there are forests and so it’s a more traditional Afghan style Operation if you will and we want nothing to do with that. We had 20 years of that, thank you, we’re done.
JC: Do you think nuclear supremacy in the Middle East plays into any of this? I saw something, I think it was in the Times of Israel, Netanyahu, suggesting that Saudi Arabia get some sort of Iranian enrichment program going. Do you think there is some sort of tacit agreement nuclear power energy possibly weapons are involved in the Israel-US-Saudi side of things?
PZ: Not in the short term at least probably not in the midterm. The Israelis I don’t think have a nuclear power system. Yeah I don’t think so but they do have a couple hundred tactical nukes which are more than enough for their strategic needs. They might, might, might, might, they’re very cagey on this, have a few city flatteners just in case Iran gets too uppity. But that is, it’s all designed as a last ditch. This is what we do when the last of us is going into the ocean because we’ve been overrun sort of play. They don’t have a strategic doctrine for anything less than that. As for the Saudis, the Saudis have a lot of military stuff on paper, but it’s all shrink-wrapped and stored in air-conditioned warehouses. And they only very, very recently started training on any of it themselves when they came to the conclusion that the U.S. really, really had no interest in coming to pull them out of the fire if they pick a fight with someone, including Iran. Iran, of course, has a nuclear weapons program, but has not been able to create a device, much less a deliverable weapon. And to be perfectly blunt, it’s not clear that they’re going to be able to. They might. They probably will be able to get enough fissile material to do it, but Iranian engineers are not world-class and they were not world-class by definitions in the 1940s, much less today. So I would think that if the Iranians were ever gonna get a weapon, they would have done it already. But if I’m wrong and they are closer than I think, then I will bet my entire life that the Saudis will go to Pakistan and purchase a few nukes the next day. Saudi technical acumen is significantly below that of Iran’s, but they’ve got a really big checkbook and there are some people out there who have nukes who with the right number would sell and the Saudis have already set that up so it can happen very, very quickly should they feel so premised. But the U.S. will have nothing to do with that. If anything, the U.S. would do a significant amount of things to prevent it from happening, but I don’t think we could stop it.
JC: Interesting. Future of Gaza, what do you see, whether it’s short-term, let’s say two weeks to a month, and then five years out? Has the paradigm changed based on the level of violence against civilians over the last few days?
PZ: Well, let’s start at what it was before the assaults. This was an open-air prison camp. This is an area that has no economic reason to exist. It is a prison camp and as such there is no meaningful trade. It’s dependent upon the outside world for over 90% of their food and 100% of their energy. Those supplies either come from Israel directly as a kind of a drip feed just to keep the place quiet or international donations, and that is the entire story. So while I don’t obviously do anything but vomit when I see what has happened and what Hamas has done, you have to admit when the best that you could hope for is to be mayor of a prison camp. That’s the height of social and technological achievement in Gaza. You can understand why some people choose some darker paths. They’ll never get back to where they were. Israel controls all but one sliver of the border which is with Egypt and that’s where the tunnels are that allow the Palestinians to smuggle things in. At a minimum, the minimum response that we will see out of Israel is clearing out an area maybe a quarter of a half mile thick and compressing the prison even a little bit more to make sure that none of those tunnels can never be used again and these people will be completely at the mercy of whatever the Israeli political system allows and I don’t see another way out of that because the Egyptians are the only other country in play here they’re on the wrong side of the sign and I to project power here and even if they could project power they’re not going to do it to free Gaza, because even if the walls went away tomorrow, then it’s an open-air prison camp with fewer walls. There is not a future here. And now that we’ve seen very clearly that Hamas cannot not only not only patrol its own territory to prevent things like this from happening, but actually encourage things like this to happen. There is no administration that can go in there and fix this. So you’re looking at a degree of organizational chaos if the Israelis win and do root out Hamas. And if they fail, then you’re talking about a state of on-again, off-again, open warfare with the people that have nowhere to go. The humanitarian scale of what’s about to happen is going to be horrific.
JC: Yeah. And future of Israel, when you look, I’m sorry, Israel, Iran, when you look at Iran and their connections to Hamas, Hezbollah, what do you see in their future, whether it’s short-term or long-term, and is it dependent on what happens here in the next couple months with Israel and Hamas and Hezbollah?
PZ: Well, from our last talk, we talked a lot about China and Russia and how we’re going to both outlive both of those countries. We’re not going to outlive Iran. Iran’s been around for a very long time. It’s had good government continuity over most of the 4,000 plus years that Persia’s been in existence in some form. And the ruling class isn’t one person like it is in China. It’s a group of 10,000 mullahs. So even the world’s most aggressive assassination campaign can’t wipe that out. In addition, it’s mountainous. So the military challenge of ever defeating Iran in any circumstance is almost impossible. That doesn’t mean it’s going to be a dynamic economic power. That doesn’t even mean it’s destined to be a long-run oil exporter. But it does mean it’s durable. No matter how this goes down, Iran will survive this just fine in the short run. The question, of course, is in Riyadh. So the Iranians, I would be shocked if we don’t find the information relatively soon that they helped shape this operation and helped support Hamas. But again, everyone in this area has been a friend. Everyone in this area has been a foe. Hamas is Sunni and Arab, whereas Iran is Shia and Persian and they think of each other as apostates. They are convenient allies for the moment and from the Iranian point of view entirely disposable. So if they can get someone that they think is an apostate to do some horrific things in order to break up the potential alliance between two other apostate groups, for them there’s no downside here. And even odds, they’re going to get their way. But even if they don’t, they have demonstrated that they have the capacity to manipulate groups a thousand miles away in ways that no one can detect. From their point of view, there’s no downside here. From their point of view, there’s nothing but potential successes ahead of them. Because if they really did have a role in this, then there’s no reason to expect that they can’t do it again with another group that maybe is even a little bit more ideologically allied, such as Hezbollah, who are Shia.
JC: Interesting. Do you think this is a pyrrhic victory for Hamas? One of the – they will tout as the most successful operation in their history. But did it change the dynamic enough in that the gloves essentially have come off and the restraint when you look at capability of the Israeli military and what we thought of the Israeli intelligence services the restraint that they have essentially exercised over the last decade a little over a decade is that a thing of the past?
PZ: Yeah probably it’s difficult to clarify the mind of somebody who has an ISIS-like approach to the world. But it appears to be that the thinking is, is if we kill enough Israelis openly, publicly, obviously, brutally, that they will roll into Gaza. And even if we can turn it into a kill box and kill 10,000 Israeli soldiers, and even if every single one of us dies, the process of the Israelis doing that will kill so many civilians that had nothing to do with this, that the world will condemn Israel in a way that actually means something. And before you say that’s completely batshit, keep in mind that that was basically Osama bin Laden’s approach for 9-11. You bait the United States to do something it wouldn’t ordinarily do, and in doing so trigger a region-wide uprising to overthrow the secular governments of the region. It didn’t work, but that didn’t stop them from doing it.
JC: Yeah, and in the few minutes we have left, I wanted to ask you about something you’ve talked about in your books and you spoke about it recently on your YouTube channel, and that’s the future of the U.S. Navy securing trade routes and providing essentially security for the globe post-World War II, and what that looks like going forward.
PZ: Well, that’s a big jump from Gaza, but sure. Okay, so the whole idea of globalization is it was a bribe. We were so scared of Stalin in the days after World War II that we knew that we needed millions of people to stand between us and the Red Army. Globalization is what we did. We used our Navy to patrol the open oceans to create global trade, and in exchange, you had to join us in the Cold War. And for the Europeans, that meant standing up and facing off against the Russians. And it worked. But the strategy that worked when we were the world’s only Navy has steadily faded. Ever since 92 when the wall came down, we’ve been backing away from that security role and we have elected a series of ever more economically nationalist presidents. People forget that from an economic, international point of view that Biden and Trump are the two most similar presidents we’ve ever had. Just one of them knows how to use a grammar checker. We’re not in the 50s anymore. The Soviets had a navy, but they were almost landlocked. The navy split up in four different seas. So it wasn’t until after 1992 that we saw meaningful navies rise up in third powers to a degree that could potentially challenge us, with China of course being at the top of the list, and Japan’s no slouch. The Brits are back in the game, the French never went away, the Turks have some interesting stuff, and the Russians are now sharing their technology with anyone who will pay for it. India has made the board as well. So to maintain that position would require a much more powerful naval patrolling capacity than we had back in the 1980s. And our Navy patrolling capacity is much less than it was in the 1990s, because like everybody else in 1992, we declared kind of an end to history, and we changed the way our Navy works. It used to have global reach and global operational capacity. Now we’ve turned it into a purely military force, which I know sounds a little weird, but focused around the carrier battle groups so we can knock rogue nations off their perch. So we today have 12 of those, and all of our ships are basically committed to providing the defensive rings around the carriers. And they’re the most powerful military platforms and units in human history, but we no longer have a large enough fleet in numbers to be everywhere at once like we used to be, and there are challenges in most of those places. So we would need probably 700 or 800 destroyers to provide global maritime security. We only have 70 and at any given time half of those are with the carriers. So we’re not in a position to even theoretically try. So, the first time someone takes a shot at a civilian vessel and we’re not there, that’s going to unwind a whole lot of things that we’ve become used to, everything from electronic supply chains to global oil.
JC: Yeah, and I ask about it because of if two or even three battle groups are heading to the med, one up maybe in the Strait of Hormuz perhaps, what that means for the rest of the world and what that means for…
PZ: This is more carrier activity than we’ve had in this part of the world in almost 20 years. And that means it has to come from somewhere else.
JC: Perfect. Now, so 10 years from now, 20 years from now, these countries who have been enjoying this protection of trade routes, for the most part, from the United States, how does that change the balance of trade?
PZ: Oh, well, global trade will go away. It will be regional in areas where local powers can provide their own maritime cover. The Western Hemisphere, I think, will probably be fine and we’ll have some partners in Southeast Asia plus Australia and New Zealand. And Japan, a bit of a surprise from 10 years ago, is basically joining that club. So there still will be global trade, if you want to call that. It’s more a series of regions that might be able to find some partnerships. But the hilarious thing is the country that has benefited the most from this globalization structure in the American security overwatch this whole time, China, they’re by far the country that’s most dependent upon being able to send civilian vessels anywhere and at any time. And, and wow they’re screwing the pooch. There are a lot of people who talk about the Chinese playing the long game and being very well thought out. I’m like, no, it’s a cult of personality. It’s one dude making policy in a room by himself, and he’s doing so many stupid things. And challenging the US Navy is probably just the height of idiocy, because that is the backbone for his country’s economic existence. Not success, existence. They import 3 quarters of their energy, and they import 3 quarters of the stuff that allows them to grow their own food, and that’s before you start considering the income that comes as the technology that arrives because of their play in global electronics. All that is being pissed away.
JC: That’s why I love talking to you. And I know I gotta let you go, but there’s one thing that you wish Americans would think about, understand, about the situation in Israel with Hamas right now. What is that one thing?
PZ: There’s no win here for anyone, so be careful who you condemn.
JC: Interesting. Is there a new book on the horizon? What do I have to enjoy next?
PZ: I’ve got to be with a regular book to read them all. No comment yet? Pretty much nonstop for the last year and a half, so there hasn’t been time to think about it, but I will start thinking about it next year.
JC: All right, all right. Well, keep me posted. I can’t wait to read it, whatever it is. And anyone else listening out there, be sure and follow Peter on those social channels and also sign up for that YouTube channel. It is fascinating and illuminating. So, appreciate you taking the time today. I know how busy you are and I hope I can link up with you in person one of these days soon.
PZ: That would be great.
JC: See you soon. All right, take care.
Thank you for tuning in to the Danger Close podcast, an Ironclad original presented by Navy Federal Credit Union. To find out more about Peter Zeihan and what he has going on, go to his website and that is Z-E-I-H-A-N.com. Also follow him on Instagram, Zeihan on Geopolitics, and on Twitter at Peter Zeihan, and on YouTube at Zeihan on geopolitics and be sure to pick up his books. You can follow me on social channels at Jack Carr USA official JackCarr.com is the website. If you enjoyed this conversation be sure to leave a 5 star rating and review wherever you get your podcasts. Until the next time, take care out there, stay safe, be strong, keep fighting.
This Jack Carr episode is presented by Navy Federal Credit Union and is an IRONCLAD Original.
