Who won? To get at this question, let me tell you a story. Some might call it a "narrative" but it's really just a story. I'll let you decide whether it's entirely factual or somewhat fictional (some persnickety people can always point out some details that just don't fit the overall picture) but I will try to keep it as grounded in fact as I can.

Once upon a time there was a country called Usania which was (ostensibly) run by nutcases. There were plenty of sane Usanians to choose from but none of them wanted to be president. As the great Usanian writer Kurt Vonnegut aptly put it, "only nutcases want to be president." This was because, nutcases or not, presidents were not allowed to run Usania but only pretended to do so because of something called "checks and bounces". Or something like that. And this dissuaded non-nutcase Usanians from trying out for such a silly job.

And given that they were, as it were, all nutcases, the presidents were, quite wisely, not allowed to actually run Usania and this prerogative was secretly handed over to shadowy players who were kept out of the public eye as much as possible. These apparatchiks never faced public scrutiny and never stood for elections; consequently, there was no corrective feedback mechanism that could have weeded out the idiots, the psychopaths and the cleptomaniacs from their midst. Total degeneracy ensued, creeping up slowly at first, then bursting out into the open when the entire world was forced to bear witness as around Anno Domini 2020 Usania became an unreformable, ungovernable, internally conflicted mess.

Right around this time Usania ran out of nutcases who wanted to be president, and so they "elected" (in a manner of speaking, for Usania was never really a democracy) a senile old man named Joe who had never worked a day in his life (smelling up the halls of congress doesn't count) and stumbled through his four years as the supposed Nutcase in Chief, attempting to shake hands with ghosts, sniffing and biting people and spending most of the time in hiding while the apparatchiks forged his signature on countless official documents, including ones that pardoned them from any offenses, real or imaginary, that they may or may not have committed or were perhaps planning to commit.

When the "election" time rolled around and Joe's incapacity became shockingly obvious, he was hastily replaced with a mentally retarded Indian woman whose qualifications for the high office were her lack of testicles and her fashionably dark skin — that and her mad cackle, which indeed qualified her as a nutcase. As her feeble-mindedness became a matter of public discourse, she lost the "election" to a proper nutcase: a narcissistic bloviating buffoon named Donald, who had previously taken a stab at being Nutcase in Chief, with disastrous consequences, but showed up for more of the same anyway. His qualifications for leadership included his experience in running real estate swindles, organizing gambling institutions, running contests for large-breasted, toothy women and fake wrestling competitions and playing the lead role in reality shows with lots of peons where he got to say "You're fired!" whenever one of these peons screwed up.

During the tenure of the brain-dead Joe the apparatchiks came up with a truly harebrained plan to overthrow Russia's dread dictator Putin. This had been an idée fixe for these apparatchiks for a long time. They armed and trained some Ukrainians, the Ukraine being a piece of Russia which it had temporarily sloughed off during the dissolution of the USSR, as Russia would sometimes do, being such a large country and at times difficult to hold together. The apparatchiks ordered the Ukrainians to attack the Russians living in what was at the time the eastern part of the Ukraine, forcing Russia to intervene to protect its people. A clinical example of delusional thinking, the apparatchiks thought that the demoralized Russian troops would throw down their rusty weapons and run away, the Russian government would fall apart and the Russian people would rise up and overthrow the dread dictator Putin. Somehow, they had failed to notice how over the course of Putin's long reign Russia has once again become rich, prosperous, very well armed and expertly managed. They also neglected to notice that Putin consistently enjoys approval ratings of around 80%, making it highly unlikely that the 20% who do not wholeheartedly approve of him could be induced to revolt and to overthrow him. A nasty and prolonged armed conflict ensued in which over a million Ukrainians and tens of thousands of Russians lost their lives.

By the time senile old Joe was turned out to pasture and bloviating buffoon Donald once again became Nutcase in Chief, it had become abundantly clear that the Ukraine had lost the war, with the frontline advancing in Russia's favor slowly but relentlessly. Donald's handlers did their best to portray this defeat as senile old Joe's fault and made several misguided attempts to stop the carnage, but that simply wasn't enough. What Donald's quickly fading public image needed was a whole new military victory. Then the Usanians, who have attention spans of between 6 and 8 minutes, conditioned by standard sitcom segment length, would forget all about the Ukrainian defeat and only think about the great new victory.

But where to start a war? Bibi, the Israeli prime minister, who had been holding onto this position for dear life in order to avoid going to jail for corruption, offered to help: why don't we attack Iran with the excuse of having to destroy its nuclear weapons program (which Bibi thought up based on no information) and replace its government with one that Donald and Bibi would like? Donald's apparatchiks jumped up and down with glee and off they went to war. Israel launched a campaign of political assassination against the Iranian leadership by activating sleeper cells inside Iran which Israel had been cultivating since around 2010. The mighty Usanian military then swung into action and made some impressive-looking bomb craters at the entrances to the cave in which, the Usanian apparatchiks reckoned, Iran's nuclear bombs might be hiding.

Needless to say, the war went just as badly as the one in the Ukraine, but it only took 12 days instead of three years to reach the stage of total fiasco. Bibi then begged Donald to make the Iranians stop lobbing rockets at Israel that were steadily destroying Israel's ports, oil refineries, military facilities and electric grid. Donald then opted for Plan B — of playing the peacemaker — and told Israel and Iran to knock it off. When they didn't immediately knock it off but continued lobbing missiles at each other, he dropped some f-bombs. Eventually the rocket duel did stop, and Donald started looking forward to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. What he got instead was a rather large scandal over his handling of the issue of Iran's reputed nuclear weapons program, calling into question whether such a program existed at all and, if so, whether Donald's attack on it destroyed it, slowed it or hastened it.