A panicked Lego Donald Trump flips through a folder marked “Llrey Epstein File.” A cackling Lego Benjamin Netanyahu eggs him on, and a Lego Satan looks on pleased. Then Lego Trump fires a missile. It hits a girls’ school, rendered as a pair of pink shoes and a small backpack left in the debris.

This is a vignette from “Narrative of Victory,” an AI-generated short broadcast by Iranian state media on Mar. 10. It has been viewed millions of times on social media, and has been written about, with mounting awe, by analysts in Washington, London and Tel Aviv. The Islamic Republic, we are told, has discovered something new: a state weapon disguised as a provocation, a viral artifact the United States and Israel cannot match.

There is a chorus of singing this tune. The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, The Nation, New Lines, PBS NewsHour, France 24 and The Hill have all published variations of the same theme. The Institute for Strategic Dialogue supplied the headline statistic: in the first 50 days of the war, posts from Iranian embassies and officials drew roughly 900 million views and 22 million likes, a 30-fold jump in engagement.

Iran, we are being encouraged to believe, has won the meme war. The numbers are real. The videos are good. The Iranian embassy in Zimbabwe, mocking Trump with the line “we’ve lost the keys” to the Strait of Hormuz, is funnier than any American diplomatic account has been in years.

But let us not get carried away. The Islamic Republic has not invented a new weapon. Its social-media strategy borrows from a playbook written by someone else. And far from winning, the plagiarists are doomed to fail because they are not as good at this, in the literal and metaphorical senses, as the originators. The playbook is Ukraine’s.

From the first hours of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kyiv set about doing in pixels what it could not yet do on the battlefield. Consider Volodymyr Zelensky in his drab-olive T-shirt, filming himself in the streets of his capital; the @Ukraine and @DefenceU accounts........

© Time