How we chose this week’s image
We have two covers this week, on the dangers of Donald Trump’s supremely transactional approach to foreign policy, and on what happens to society when people depend on inheriting money almost as much as they do on earning it.
Mr Trump claims he will bring peace and that, after 80 years of being taken for a ride, America is at last turning its superpower status into profit. We argue that his dealmaking will in fact make the world more dangerous and leave America weaker and poorer.
These gloomy thoughts took us in two directions. First we have a dissolving world. Everything is up for grabs: territory, technology, minerals and more. Haggling over the economy involves tariffs and also the fusion of state power and business. The planet draining away is striking, but it’s hard to connect to Mr Trump.
Second is the man himself, ready to swing a baseball bat. In his hierarchy America is number one. Next are countries with resources to sell, threats to make and leaders, such as Vladimir Putin , who are unconstrained by democracy. In the third rank are America’s allies, their dependence and loyalty seen as weaknesses ripe for exploitation.
We liked the mafia overtones, but this image confusingly points to a non-Trumpian vision of foreign policy. Carrying a big stick evokes a maxim of Theodore Roosevelt’s, which also recommended that America should speak softly—hardly a characteristic of today’s White House.
Mr Trump features on a lot of our covers just now. For this image, we originally tucked the constitution under the presidential jowls—it was for last week’s cover about executive power. Because we are now concerned with foreign policy, we have given him the world to wipe his mouth on.
Note the tomato ketchup. That makes sense because the complexity of Mr Trump’s vision is almost certain to cause a mess. Saudi Arabia wants a defence deal to deter Iran, which America may grant if the Saudis recognise Israel. But that requires Israel and the Palestinians to endorse a two-state future, which Mr Trump rejected in his plan to bring peace to Gaza. And so on.
This is a more powerful representation of the idea that everything is for sale. Advocates of dealmaking assume that America can get what it wants by bargaining. Yet as Mr Trump exploits decades-old dependencies, America’s leverage will rapidly fall away. Given that grim outlook, we wanted more menace.
That led here. A mafioso’s might-is-right world appeals to those who believe that, under the post-1945 framework of rules and alliances, Americans have been suckered into accepting unfair trade and paying for foreign wars.
But a transactional world has problems, too. When America wants to project hard power or defend the homeland, it depends on allied help, from the Ramstein Air Base in Germany to missile-tracking in the Canadian Arctic. America may no longer have free access to them.
The figure of Mr Trump was good, but he was keeping the wrong company. For our final cover, out went Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky of France and Ukraine; in came Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Binyamin Netanyahu and Muhammad bin Salman, of Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, the reservoir dogs of geopolitics.
Our cover in Europe is about the inheritocracy. People in advanced economies stand to inherit around $6trn this year—about 10% of GDP, up from around 5% on average in a selection of rich countries during the middle of the 20th century. These days, whether a young person can afford to buy a house and live in relative comfort is determined almost as much by how much money they inherit as by how much they succeed at work.
Our argument is that this shift imperils not just the meritocratic ideal, but capitalism itself.
We started with two images of death—an ATM-tombstone and a funerary urn filled with coins. That makes sense, because inheritance is first of all about legacies. But these covers steer you away from the real subject, which is about the people left behind.
The most striking thing about the inheritocracy is that the typical heir is someone inheriting a normal house, not a superyacht or a country pile. Housing wealth has rocketed in recent decades, especially in cities like London, New York and Paris. As a result, a 90th-percentile income has become too small to pay for a 90th-percentile life. You must have significant capital, too—if not from your parents’ estate, then from the Bank of Mum and Dad.
These ideas focus on the children—a silver spoon with the keys to a new house, and cot with a very big pile of money underneath. A loophole-ridden tax system means that inheritocrats spend a lot of their time gaming the rules; it would be better if they did something useful with their money. More worrying still is how an underclass of non-beneficiaries is being left behind—and becoming disillusioned with democracy.
We were heading in the right direction. For the final image, though, we chose a velvet cushion holding a baby’s dummy made of gold. Unfortunately, it is not a pacifier for society so much as a source of strife and discontent.
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