Lost in the excitement of Trump’s proposed cabinet appointment is the lack of neocons in the list of foreign policy names. There are plenty of pro-Israel people, no doubt suggested by the Israel Lobby. It is rather clear that Trump made a deal with The Lobby in exchange for their support in the general election. All his proposed foreign policy people are Iran hawks, except for Gabbard. Otherwise, it is looking like an Israel first foreign policy shop under Trump.
It is important to note that the neocons are not part of The Lobby. They may have a lot of things in common, but they are different gangs with different agendas. The neocons are not Zionists. In fact, they come out of the anti-Zionist intellectual sphere with roots in international communism. The neocons are happy to work with the Zionists and the Israel Lobby when it suits their interests and vice-versa. As we saw under Biden, they are also happy to work against the Zionists as well.
To some degree, Trump’s victory is due to the Biden administration making the strategic blunder of prioritizing Ukraine over Israel after October 7, 2023. Israel looked at that Hamas attack as the opportunity to settle issues dating back to the Six-Day War, when Israel controlled much of the land that the Zionist consider part of Greater Israel but was given up in order to make peace. Netanyahu also imagined a regional war, drawing in the United States to topple the Iranian regime.
Instead, the Biden admin worked to prevent a full-blown regional war, often choking off support to Israel, at least in the view of The Lobby. It turned out that the “arsenal of democracy” did not have enough arms for both Israel and Ukraine, so the neocons running the Biden administration chose to favor Ukraine. Further, The Lobby thought the Biden administration failed to handle the anti-Israel protests that broke out at elite college campuses after Israel launched war on Gaza.
The result was The Lobby backed Trump over Harris and Trump committed to prioritizing Israel over all else in his foreign policy. This is one reason the neocons are escalating in Ukraine and will continue to do so. They think it could tie down the Trump administration in Ukraine and prevent them from delivering on Iran. Again, there is no love lost between the neocons and The Lobby. Contrary to what some believe, these are not two faces of the same collective hive-mind.
This does not change the fact that the neocons are headed for the political wilderness come January. While legacy conservatism would welcome them back, the future of what we call the right is anti-neocon and increasingly anti-interventionalist. The neocons have slithered back to their home on the side we call the left, but they will run into the same problem they now find with the so-called right. The groups in that coalition have little interest in the neocon agenda.
Despite Trump’s commitment to the project, it is not all good news for Israel, or the vast support network called The Israel Lobby. The main problem is the political instability within Israel that could blow up before Trump takes office. Protests against Netanyahu are a regular feature in Israel. Netanyahu is slowly losing the judicial fight surrounding his many corruption probes. Then you have the hardliners in his coalition, who are gaining power as he struggles to maintain his position.
Making matters worse is the fact that it may no longer be possible to bully Iran with the threat of military strikes. The tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran revealed serious flaws in Iranian security, but it also revealed newfound military prowess by Iran. On the one hand, Iran’s missile and drone program is far more advanced than what had been assumed until this exchange. On the other hand, her air defense capabilities are also much better, largely due to Russian assistance.
Then you have the withering of support for Israel in America. The Lobby has roots going back to the middle of the last century, where it capitalized on certain events in the Second World War to build a vast network of support for Israel. Much of this rested on the sense that the Jews deserved special consideration due to what happened to them in the war. Demographic change and the actuarial tables are slowly eroding this base of support, both politically and morally.
Taken together, the ground is shifting underneath the feet of The Lobby, as the state of Israel succumbs to its own demographic revolution and the conditions in the Middle East change to reflect the reality of the multipolar world. The Lobby might not fear the sight of an American carrier on fire in the Persian Gulf, but the Trump people certainly do, and they will have to adjust to this possibility. As with many other things, Trump may be a transitional figure regarding American Zionism.
Put another way, the Zionists may be about to follow the neocons into the political wilderness, despite having their guys in the White House. American Zionism, like neoconservatism, is a creature of the last century. It evolved for conditions that are slowly fading into the history books. Like so much of American politics, it has failed to adapt to the new reality. Just as the Biden administration was the last gasp of neoconservatism, Trump may be the last gasp for American Zionism.
That does not mean the end of Israel or The Lobby. Unlike neoconservatism, Zionism and Israel have a future. There is no interest in the “destruction of Israel’ within the Arab world or among its new friends in the multipolar order. Israel can maintain itself, even without the unlimited support of America. Zionism and The Lobby simply must adapt to the reality of the multipolar world and the changing role of the American empire as it slowly returns to being a normal country.
While Trump could turn out to be the last Zionist in the old school sense of it, he could also become the first Zionist in the new sense of it. On the other hand, if he fumbles the problem of Iran, he could simply be the last American Zionist. The images of an American carrier on fire in the Persian Gulf would signal then end of public support for Israel and The Lobby. Either way, Donald Trump is most likely the last of the old school Zionist presidents and the last gasp of this version of The Lobby.
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Generational change is worth discussing here. Netanyahu is old. The Ayatollah is even older. Amazingly, the median age in Israel is below Iran’s (29 vs. 31) and its fertility rate is much higher than Iran’s, although Iran’s population dwarfs Israel’s (84M vs. 10M). So we’re on the cusp of enormous cultural and demographic change. Iran and Turkiye have the same population but Turkiye is 3x wealthier and we here would consider Turkiye poor. So it’s just inevitable that Iran will have to focus on economic development and that Israel will get less bellicose as the ultra-Orthodox become demographically dominant. This is the recipe for peace. The job of the US should be to catalyze the process.
Trump is a product of Queens NY and, as such, bravura is in his blood. But he is no real brawler like the boys from the Bronx. He talks a good game, but negotiation is his aim. So yes, he cut deals with the Lobby and Biden to get reelected and that will be his MO going forward. With Putin, the only real path forward is a new European security framework in which Russia gets its needs met and the West still gets limited access to Ukrainian resources. In the ME, Netanyahoo must go and the Palestinians must get a real and independent homeland. Can Trump do this? We’ll see.
American Zionism diminishes every day, because every day the silents and boomers are dying. Xers aren’t as zionist, and the generations under them aren’t zionist at all. Jews gotta make hay while the sun shines. There is only so long they can hold congress captive to an agenda the voters reject. For now, enough voters are still on board. But fewer every day.
Trump is doing the good cop bad cop thing with his nominations. His ultimate goal is probably an Israel-Iran peace treaty. If you want to kill the interventionists and neocons and MIC in one shot, negotiate a peace treaty.
Time to take the candy away from the hyperactive children.
Russia took a hit from those new missiles, reports say. I think they’ll absorb these hits as basically mosquito bites knowing that the regime in Washington is trying to provoke a European wider war. Putin will wait out Biden and deal with Trump.
Trump can deflate the Ukrainian Army by stopping the funding. He should form a joint commission with Russia to investigate the Nordstream bombing and arrest everyone who participated in terrorism grounds, no matter where that trial leads.
The current Washington regime should be thought of as a hurricane. It struck Ukraine, killing many, and now it’s time to help them recover. I think the best approach is some sort of bilateral operation with the Russians to get things back to something resembling normal in Ukraine.
Hold US citizens accountable for terrorism would be a good step in that direction.
I think you are correct about russia. the unspoken fact is that the ukrainians have very few of these missles in country. like much of what we have “given ” them, many are still in the “pipeline”
I think Putin is astute to know that a new sheriff will be in town come January 20 and that starting a war would be unnecessary. My guess is a peace deal will give the Donbass and Crimea and any other seized land with ethnic Russians to the Russians, ban Ukraine from joining NATO and transform Ukraine into a landlocked rump state with a military that can’t threaten the Russians.
That’s a good deal for us. It’s a shame we wasted billions over there and likely much of those funds were skimmed by the Ukies, who are absurdly corrupt.
I think that Chronic Bagel Fatigue is starting to have an effect on the younger Normies. People are just tired of them, and their constant demands.
Like I said the other day, the Trump Administration can appoint Iran hawks, but with the President-elect stating that he intends to declare an emergency with respect to the illegal invasion and the open border, and use the armed forces, as is his duty as Commander-in-Chief, that means the forces available to make war on Iran for Bagel Land won’t be there. Not when the forces needed are deployed to the Rio Grande, where they belong, and where Normie wants them.
This view makes the most sense, and is likely what Trump is thinking. However, the argument from sanity may fail unless Trump has predetermined that he will never go to war with Iran no matter what and the “no matter what” fails to sway him in the coming year.
Israel and Netanyahu are desperate and delusional over existential problems, and they believe that getting America to defeat Iran will solve all their problems. Contra Z-Man, Scott Ritter believes Israel is already dead due to economic and demographic factors.
Per Douglas MacGregor, sanity does not go above two star generals in the GAE Military, and the Pentagon especially does not want to hear it. The consensus is stuck in the pre 2020, maybe pre 2000 world where Iran is viewed as weak and America is still a super power with an army that can roll Arab nations.
One possible scenario is Trump has already offered the Israel Lobby an “easy” war with Iran to appease the foreign policy and military establishments in order to have a free hand on domestic issues. Mr. Art of the Deal and all.
Also contra Z-Man, Judge Napolitano’s crew has dug up dirt on Tulsi Gabbard that says she’s an Iran hawk. Thiel is also an Iran hawk.
All the weights in the political calculus say a war with Iran will happen. Sanity and feasibility have not been reliable indicators for a long time.
So we get WWII courtesy of the Christian Zionists rather than the Neocons? A distinction without much of a difference, sez me.
‘To some degree, Trump’s victory is due to the Biden administration making the strategic blunder of prioritizing Ukraine over Israel after October 7, 2023.’
To a minor degree, perhaps. The election of Trump was much more a rebuke of the southern open border, and of the deliberate tanking of the economy (and the dollar) in order to destroy America and Build Back Better, i.e., install the totalitarian NWO.
Ironically, Trump kicked off the ruination of the economy by shilling his disastrous Operation Warp Speed poison vax program. How quickly the sheeple forget. Small business was decimated by resultant ludicrous vax restrictions, and the nation still has not recovered.
The average citizen is not obsessed with Zionism or ‘the Jews’. He is, however, very much indirectly affected by Sabbatean/Frankist cultural and moral outlooks. The Sixties movements drew heavily from this rogue-Jewish pseudo-religion, and that Sixties mentality — and those Sixties actors — still drive the Left in the West.
I’m open to the possibility that voters simply reject women presidents, any women presidents, and this is what propelled Trump to the WH both times. And factored into why he lost the other time. I have always said Trump didn’t win 2016 on policy, he won because he faced the most odious major party candidate of modern times. Maybe any times. I think there may have been something of a repeat of that in 2024, when he faced another anointed, entitled candidate who had no substance whatsoever. Who both happened to be women.
This could also hamstring the Democrat party for many elections to come, as they are not even capable of having a conversation about whether or not they should be nominating women, but would rather bash their heads against the glass ceiling time after time. If we ever get both major parties nominating women, I bet you’ll see record 3rd party voting. If the GOP has any sense (highly questionable) and any will to win (even more questionable) they will always nominate a man anytime the Ds nominate a woman. Which should be often.
“…I’m open to the possibility that voters simply reject women presidents, any women presidents,…”
Count on it. If one looks at all other political positions, we see women’s inclusion grow. A female in the Presidency is one of the Leftist’s top prizes. What we’ve seen really is a selection of candidates—Clinton and Harris—who were woefully inadequate to the job. Clinton, aside from being evil, was bitchy. Harris was a moron, and might be bitchy as well. They thought they’d push her in as a “twofer”. Then there is the confounding factor of Trump as an opponent. Trump is not known to pay much deference to the “fairer sex”.
Given another circumstance, say a better economy and a reasonably intelligent, independent female candidate, you’ll have the first woman president.
Another long term weakness for the Ds is that in their quest for vaginocracy they will choose an underqualified woman over a better qualified man every time. Since it’s been at least 5 elections since they’ve held an honest primary without the DNC’s finger on the scale for their handpicked candidate.
Three wars. That was a huge factor. Nobody is fooled by what the regime is doing, but everyone feels powerless to stop the regime. So they voted for Trump. His coalition will grow as it becomes clear to Low Information Voters that he’s not actually Hitler like they were promised.
Anti regime civil unrest I think is coming. That’s what DOGE, Trump’s other nominations, and the election really are: orderly civil unrest.
It’s the other things you cited, too. But I’m married to a LIV who sometimes succumbs to the propaganda on her Apple phone news feed. She did a 180 last year when I started showing her how the regime is escalating for WW3. “Is this what you want? Your son and two daughters drafted to die in a pointless war in Eastern Europe?”
She flipped, and then started consuming other news sources and realized (woke up to) how bad things are. I give her shit all the time, in a nice way. “You want all these lunatics to be given access to power, but you refuse to accept that the resulting societal collapse is your fault.”
Has a giant empire ever before acted in this manner on behalf of a small, theoretically separate, country? This is Britain throwing everything overboard for Belgium and Poland times ten with nukes and steroids on top
Who could’ve predicted that using universities & the entire media apparatus to villifiy White people as evil colonial nazis while simultaneously importing millions of brown people & labeling them moral saints would destroy support for israel in the west?
Its a real head scratcher to be sure. Clearly the solution to this debacle is to degrade the west even more, slaughter all the palestinians while everyone watches & act with extreme aggression towards the neighboring arab countries who are increasingly aligning themselves with the eastern superpowers. That’s a recipe for success if I’ve ever seen one.
Z, one of the commentators has a malformed URL in their username (accidental?) that is drawing a blurry large box in everything past it.
Zman, something has happened to your page display.
Looks fine to me.
Yep, it gets blurry partially down the page sometimes. Sometimes not.
I disable the editor plugin, which seems to be the issue. For now the problem is gone, but the comments are less functional.
I saw the same. Usually breaks around the commenter’s name.
By appearances, you had some plugin that blurred out the Minter & Richter Designs email address, and it was breaking when a specific commenter put their email address in their display name. This caused a “blocked” sort of blur div to cover all comments beneath that user name.
I saw the same thing the other day. Replies get blurry
Israel may have a future but it’s a bleak one
and I daresay, Master Zman, that your assumptions of Israel’s continued viability seem to be based on old ideas and realities of the prior century that no longer have much currency.
anyone know of the last time the Pope, of all people, had any words of condemnation for Israel? The last time the UN has charged any nation with genocide. ?
if Israel does manage to carry on, it will be in a much reduced and circumscribed form imo,
I read circumscribed as circumcised there a second.
Have no idea if this is true, but I heard that hundreds of thousands of Jews have already left Israel. A survey showed at one in four are considering leaving. And you can bet that these are the secular Ashkenazi Jews. I’d suspect that quite a few will eventually leave (terrible news for the US, btw), meaning that Israel is going to get real Orthodox, real fast.
Good luck with that.
I have heard direct from the horse’s mouth that many are fleeing Europe and bidding up hi-rise values in Tel Aviv. The people who told me that, I came close to saying, “Barbara Lerner Spectre’s chickens coming home to roost.”
I didn’t have the heart to say it. You aren’t going to convince people who are convinced the world is just bent against them for no reason otherwise.
We’re all on our own now as collectives that is. Our people have a real challenge to shake off atomized individualism. I think all of them should find a way to hang out regularly with tribesmen. They will learn and see very quickly that are not and never will be one of them – even the most liberal is defined as being apart.
It is at once a source of tremendous strength and that by definition causes tremendous problems when the outsiders finally start asking, “How well is this working out for me?”
Last fall plus Musk’s Twitter and TikTok was a seismic event under seismic conditions of information flow.
Vivek’s initial commentary at the outset of the R primaries were revealing. They were probably his honest thoughts. He got a talking to by a superior power and changed his talking points. A deal was struck.
However, once you start brow beating powerful and ascendent people into submission you start making more and more powerful enemies who perhaps once just were saying what they thought was right who had no problem with you into someone who now holds a deep resentment of being cowed and humiliated. This is happening more and more.
In the end, for us, we are far removed from political power. We have to take care of ourselves, avoid blaming other groups and just take control of our own lives. We must network, acquire redoubts and strengthen the network continuously.
Things are playing out in a way that is out of our control. The 20th century was a disaster that turned America into probably the greatest tragedy in terms of a state in all of human history. A vast continent with extreme wealth with a spirited, intelligent and strong people surrounded by vast oceans and possessing a huge aresenal of ICBMs.
Ellis Island and an open society along with the moral/religious fall of the WASPs will turn out to have been fatal. The only thing we can do now that is effective is concentrate all effort on our own business as a people and build networks that create patrimony and keep what we build within our own kind. Everyone else does it and if we don’t a bad situation will turn catastrophic.
As for the foreign theater it is dependent on the domestic theater and untenable arrangements filled with unviable contradictions a need for secrecy and tacit submission … … is going to unravel. We are best to stay out of it and tend to ourselves. That is, until one or some of our people are finally willing to be explicit in standing up for us with a calm and dignified strength.
Zman,
Something goofy going on with your comment section, text looks faded, like it sat out too long in the sun.
Yeah, I see that. I have no idea what is happening there. I will investigate.
This redaction courtesy of your local NSA/CIA cooperative.
It could be. This site must be on the radar
This happened to me last week. I was away from my desk for a few hours, I came back and I thought for a minute my screen had failed. Weird. Never seen anything like it.
I was pondering this morning if the Team B Jews were growing increasingly hostile to the whole Ukraine adventure as Israel seems to be the only place getting punished for NATOs moves. With the Team A cultists/neocons trying desperately to fire up WWIII on their way out things could get spicy (but, of course, nothing ever happens).
I am certain this is true, and explains much about the Zionist support for Trump. The coming war with Iran would be considerably less fraught if Russia was on the sidelines, and they have the Trotskyites to blame that she isn’t.
The existence of “Israel” is entirely predicated on a deception regarding the origin of the word ‘jew’. America, being a nominally Christian nation, is easily deceived by this word-play because of constant (((Hollywood))) propaganda and brainwashing over the past century. The typical judeo-Christian (i.e. Catholic, Protestant, Baptist, Lutheran etc etc), specifically those in modern mega churches, understands less about the Bible than they do about the so called “holocaust”. This is not only born from ignorance but as spiritual blindness foretold in Isaiah 6:9.
A country predicated on the lie of being the homeland of the “jews” when the people calling themselves jews are in fact descendants of Khazars, Edomites, Canaanites, Africans and Arabs without any Israelite blood whatsoever cannot survive. Scams, hoaxes and ponzi schemes always go bust at a certain point and so will the ultimate scam called “Israel”.
The origin of the word jew:
https://archive.org/details/originofthewordjew2/mode/2up?view=theater
Jesus was not a jew either by ancestry or religion:
https://archive.org/details/jesus-was-not-a-jew-either-by-religion-or-by-ancestry/page/n1/mode/2up
Important history not being taught
https://fgcp.org/important-history-not-being-taught-part-4
The IDF has proven it can do little more than drop bombs on apartment complexes and snipe pregnant women in the belly. The US Navy has spent a year struggling to fend off a bunch of guys living in tents in the desert. Everybody except for the US Congress and Rupert Murdoch hates Netanyahu (this includes Donald Trump) and Zionists are, let’s say, not what they used to be. Ben Shapiro was groomed at a very early age to step up on a day like 10/7/2023, and instead he blew up his whole operation, revealing himself to be little more than a brainless Israel shill, even accusing him of dual loyalty is too kind.
And yet, it doesn’t feel like there is anything that can truly push back these people for good and get them out of our lives and out of our political system so we can have a say in our own future. Just the other day the ADL was back on the attack, accusing the videogame platform Steam of being antisemitic and demanding more censorship. I think that is what is so discouraging – it’s easy to see the cracks and fault lines, but not much can be done beyond that.
If there is anything that keeps me up at night it is the thought of the Israeli Samson option. You know they will if cornered.
Israel is nothing without the United States. All its best weaponry and the specialized training required to maximize the jets and artillery stem from the Lower 48 States.
Moreover, the U S. shares vital intelligence with Jerusalem, both human Intel (CIA) and satellite (NSA). And yet it is America that acts like the client-state of Israel, not the other way around.
There is a psychological setup going on whereby Israel is seen as the prodigy child, to be handled with kid gloves, and Uncle Sam is the doting father. The child is to be accommodated. What else can explain U.S. licking up to a minor power that holds it in contempt?
— Greg (my blog: http://www.dark.sport.blog)
The faster the neocons, the lobby and Israel fade away, the better, as they’re doing their damndest to kick off WW3 and get it spiraling out of control. Although what they think they’d gain if nukes start flying is beyond me.
Think of Israel as a melting ice cube. Iran, through its proxies, is applying the heat very slowly, but steadily. As the Israelites (love that term) come under increased pressure from their various enemies, they are beginning to have doubts about their future. Tens of thousands have already left Israel for good. This will accelerate in the coming year. The reason I say this is because the Israelites have spilled too much innocent Arab blood for there ever to be any rapprochement. Revenge is best served cold, and the Iranians and their proxies have nothing but time on their hands. Not only that, but there is also the fact that neither side seems interested in peace. The ice cube is melting. When it becomes small enough, Israel will simply fade into Greater Palestine. I fail to see how Trump will be relevant during this process. Maybe by giving the Israelites a little more time?
It would be wild if, instead of the strikes in Palestine making the inhabitants abandon their hime, it’s the Israelites who abandon ship.
It’s the other side of the “two-passport issue”. Israel always liked it because it gave them an ocean of double agents to work with, but it also meant that all their citizens could pull up stakes at the sign of any inconvenience.
I’m skeptical that Israel, at least as something resembling its present form, can exist in the Levant without a whole lot of US support. While the leaders in many Arab states are willing to accomodate Israel, the populations of those same Arab states are outraged by Israeli conduct in Gaza, south Lebanon, Syria and what’s likely going to happen in the West Bank. Israel’s fate is likely to resemble that of the medieval Crusader kingdoms.
I’ve long thought the same although the Kingdom of Jerusalem wasn’t full of nukes. The reality of maintaining a distant Middle Eastern outpost surrounded by hostile neighbors is eerily similar, though.
Their willingness to accommodate Israel strikes me more as a willingness to accommodate the US which by default means they have to accept that if they want to get along with the US they have to realize it comes as a package deal with the retarded kid brother
Just as the Biden administration was the last gasp of neoconservatism, Trump may be the last gasp for American Zionism.
Flooding the West with Third World savages has exacerbated the trend we see from polling and actuarial tables. Mass migration is a minor project of the Zionists but a far greater goal of the Neocons. The Zionists can take their foot off the accelerator on mass migration and the Neocons cannot, and that will prove to be a flashpoint between the groups very soon; in many ways it mirrors the tension between supporters of the Ukraine war and those who cheer the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Both groups are horrible human beings, but our interests on this single issue of migration align with the Zionists. It is hard not to root for injuries, though.
As an aside, there is just as much a possibility of a lasting peace with Iran as it is for an all-out war. Iran has proved far weaker than claimed yet has demonstrated the capacity to inflict massive damage on Tel Aviv. The latter likely will cause the United States to back off more than bad PR of a burning and sunk carrier. Follow the shekels.
Please explain Iran’s being “far weaker than claimed.” Why do you say this?
Ineffective air defenses, particularly, or at least ones that don’t live up to billing.
I doubt that, even if their neighbors decide to let them be (a big ‘if’), their demographic reality will destroy them sooner or later.
As I noted in my comment, there are rumors that several hundred thousand Jews have already migrated to other countries – probably most to the US, unfortunately. A survey in the summer found that one in four Jews is considering leaving, and you can bet that most of these are secular Ashkenazi Jews. If even a quarter of those considering leaving actually do leave, the demographics of Israel will change even more quickly.
Israel is going to become a very different place over the next 20 or 30 years.
Yes, Israel’s demography would be ok if it were evenly distributed…But it’s almost all Orthodox and especially ultra Orthodox…The ashkenazi who rule the place have a very low birth rate, and many of them have left the country, which started this war with less than 7 million jews..so Israel is going to be ruled by the far right, who think God has given them the right to conquer everything in the area, and that is suicide..
Talking about “The Lobby” is like discussing ways to address the US National Debt: everyone knows it’s a problem, everyone is powerless to make the smallest change to anything because it’s career suicide.
A carrier hit would rattle both the warhawks and the spendthrifts (carriers are expensive). Rumors were that USN Abraham Lincoln was damaged by the Houthis in the Arabian Sea last week. Incredible claims require incredible evidence; public reports are that it quietly withdrew from the area after being untouched.
War is deception. Who the heck knows.
“”The images of an American carrier on fire in the Persian Gulf would signal the end of public support for Israel..”” wishful thinking. More than likely it would produce the opposite result.
5,000 sailors on those ships, maybe even 6. No way to keep them all quiet if she took a hit. This is also why I discount theories of TWA 800 being shot down by a naval missile. Not as many crew on a Tico cruiser, but same principle. Not that I believe the official story on TWA 800, but that’s another subject.
All the signs are that there was a major fire on the deck and the carrier went into drydock for repairs…