Dave Hanratty

And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee.

From mangled Bible quotes to strict military makeovers, the former Fox Newsman has the sights of the world trained upon him.

But are he and his boss beginning to crack?

I'm Dave Hanratty, and on this episode of the Indo Daily, I'm joined by Scott Lucas, Professor of International Politics at the UCD Clinton Institute, and by Rolling Stone political reporter Nikki McCann-Ramirez to take the temperature of the continually boiling crisis in the Middle East.

Scott Lucas, I'm going to have to pull back the curtain immediately a little bit just to start because we record this podcast.

It takes a few hours usually for us to kind of get it turned around.

And the reason I'm kind of mentioning that is because this situation in the Middle East, obviously, as anyone should know, is so rapidly changing that there's every chance that

But everything that we say now in the next few minutes could be U-turned or reversed or reneged upon by the time that we get this out.

So hopefully we are in fact current.

But Scott Lucas, you have the tricky task of, I guess, telling us where we stand as of Monday morning.

Yes, and of course, showing weakness is not something that these guys like to do or ever really acknowledge, which we will get to

Last week on the show, we had Belle True on the line, and she was making the point that with this new blockade, we kind of asked, well, practically, what does that look like?

And she mused on that and said, well, we don't know.

I mean, it could be any kind of, like, is this going to be opening fire on ships?

Is this going to be attacking ships and seizing them?

Something along those lines has in fact happened, as you allude to there.

So can you tell us what exactly has happened with the seizure of an Iranian ship?

So I'm flashing back now to last Friday.

It was getting into late afternoon.

The sun was shining and Donald Trump was on Truth Social saying to people that we have opened the Strait of Hormuz.