[The following is an attempt by your friends here at Anti-Imperialism to apply to the u.$. the same journalistic standards which it reserves for its enemies. Sadly, the result is much more cogent and only slightly satirical.]

Late Wednesday night, the u.$. regime tested its anti-ICBM systems over an outpost on one of their isolated Pacific island possessions. The test was a disaster, and the u.$. was unable to bring down the mock warhead. This comes after a u.$. naval ship collided—yes, you heard right, collided—with a shipping vessel in the Sea of Japan. This marks the latest in a series of upsets for a secretive regime that puts so much stock in such exercises.

The ruling party has yet to release a statement on the missile failure, but the country’s erratic and megalomaniacal strongman will certainly punish most of those responsible, sequestered away on his compound estate in Florida or in his literally golden tower, it is unknown where the leader is at any given time. Trying to read this regime has been increasingly difficult in recent years, and observers are often discouraged from trying to understand it at all given its bizarre pageantry, monolithic statues of deceased leaders (going so far as to carve the faces of a seemingly random barbershop quartet of them onto a granite mountain overlooking illegally annexed territory), and meandering addresses from regime spokesmen.

“It is an enigma, that much is clear” says one anonymous specialist from Moscow University’s Occidental Studies Center. “The border is impenetrable, highly militarized. The only way in is a sanctioned flight, but even passengers on airlines have been seized and held by the regime on the whim of the leader.” His informants have been forced recently to cross the treacherous 49th parallel, the boundary between the u.$. and its only slightly less erratic neighbor.

Following the recent mock election, wherein gerontocrats battle for power amid absurd and highly performative acts of exaggerated consent by a small number of civilians in the country, the regime has been instituting decrees from both the leader and the local governorates to curb what little free speech exists in the u.$. UN human rights investigators have dubbed these renewed restrictions “alarming and undemocratic.”