If international politics and issues of war and peace in 2024 were about ice hockey, this is being written with just over a minute left in the game. Although the game is still on, this year’s winners and losers can be decided.
Russia has won the war in Ukraine, and the crowd is just waiting for the final whistle so that Team NATO’s bruised centre-forward, Volodymyr Zelensky, can be led off the ice to the penalty box.
In reality, Ukraine lost the match already back in 2022, but managed to continue thanks to substitutes and new sticks and equipment from Team NATO (completely against the rules). Although the players have since skated wearing Ukrainian jerseys, the battle for the puck has since been between NATO and Russia.
A more unexpected winner is Israel in the fight for its survival in the Middle East, at least if you believe the chanting hate mobs in the stands.
The match started with the theocratic Iran-sponsored terrorist group Hamas’ intrusion into Israel’s half of the field on October 7, 2023. The Jumbotron displayed, with loud music and flashing spotlights, the score: 1,200 dead and 200 kidnapped Israelis. Head coach Netanyahu responded with a successful counter-terrorist operation behind the opponent’s goal. The already agitated Hamas fans in the stands threw a collective fit, and for a couple of minutes, it looked as though the entire arena might explode.
Thanks to two well-planned counterattacks in the third period, Tel Aviv literally castrated the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon (exploding pagers and walkie-talkies)—also sponsored by Iran.
The second event was a Hail Mary by the terrorist-labelled group HTS and its walkover victory into Damascus, scoring into an empty goal with a slap shot of biblical proportions which, according to its team captain Al-Sharaa, 43, sent Iran 40 years back in time.
Back to 1983, to be exact, when the mullahs in Tehran (four years after the 1979 revolution) began their expansion toward the Mediterranean with two bomb attacks that together killed over 300 people, the majority of them U.S. Marines in Beirut.
The big loser of 2024 is thus Iran—or at least the country’s theocratic leadership. Perhaps there is a way back for the country, if they stop cheating and revert to their secular way of life and its ancient club name, Persia.
The match for Syria looks set for the playoffs, but if the new substitutes in Syria, recruited from the HTS club, deliver on their promises, even the civilian population in Syria might start moving toward becoming winners—or at least stop constantly losing.
As members of Team NATO, pretty much all of the EU is also stuck in the losers lounge.
In the U.S., the Democrats and their 82-year-old cover boy, Joseph Biden, lost. The winner was 78-year-old Donald Trump.
Even though there is still a month before Trump formally takes the reins of the U.S., it seems obvious that the team’s game plan is set. No one should be surprised if American paratroopers descend from the skies in 2025 to “liberate” and “democratise” both Panama and Greenland.
The first country, we guess, from evil Chinese and South American drug cartels, and Greenland from, well, Denmark.