The Economist Cover For 03/16/2024

The Economist Read in browser MARCH 16TH 2024 Cover Story newsletter from The Economist SUBSCRIBER ONLY Cover Story How we chose this week’s image Insert a clear and simple description of the image Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief This week we have two covers, on America’s remarkable economy and what could stop it, and on Russia as it stages another election to acclaim Vladimir Putin as president. America’s economy is riding high. The unemployment rate has been below 4% for 25 months in a row. Instead of ending 2023 in recession, as many expected, it kept going—and was nearly 3% bigger than at the end of 2022. Over five years, America’s economy has grown twice as fast as the euro zone’s and ten times as fast as Japan’s. This performance reminded us of another cover we ran, almost a year ago. How about taking the idea to its extreme? In April 2023 our cowboy had been towering over the prairie. Today we have him above the clouds. That is fitting: America’s economy has remained in the saddle despite sharp interest-rate rises, a trade war with China and real wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. However, unless you remember last year’s cover, this image is a bit baffling. Why is the horse up in the troposphere? What is it standing on? Why are its legs so long? We thought some more and came up with two other ideas. We have left the stars untouched, but converted the stripes into a bar chart. To help avoid the impression that we have cut back the flag, we have extended the lines to the right. This is beautifully simple. But it suffers from a fundamental problem. Although the American economy is indeed miraculous, we have it doubling in size over the past decade. In reality, it has grown by about a quarter. We felt that was taking too much of a graphical liberty. How about our second idea, a rippling bodybuilder? This image nicely gets at a weakness in the growth story. One big reason the economy has expanded so fast is the pandemic stimulus, worth 26% of GDP, more than double the rich-world average. Yet that dose of steroids cannot be repeated—America will this year spend more on debt interest than on defence. Indeed, protectionism and, under a future President Donald Trump, the mass deportation of illegal immigrants could yet threaten trade and the supply of labour and do real harm to the prospects for growth. This image divided our colleagues. Some worried that it would go viral in the wrong way, and that people would share it because of our bodybuilder’s trunks rather than our own ideas. Perhaps we could jettison the jockstrap? How about a tastefully placed chart—a sort of fiscal fig leaf? We doubled down, with a white pair of briefs on a white background. This image is cheeky rather than offensive. A cover is supposed to grab the eye. It’s a teaser, not a treatise. The election that Vladimir Putin will win in Russia on March 17th is a sham—a ritual acclamation. But it should nonetheless be a wake-up call for the West. Far from collapsing, Russia’s regime has proved resilient. Mr Putin’s ambitions pose a long-term threat that goes far beyond Ukraine. Despite this, however, the West is still without a Russia strategy. Over the years our covers have featured a lot of bears. The gruesome, parallel gashes in this map are all we need to depict the dangers ahead. The immediate worry is a defeat of Ukraine and, after that, attacks on neighbouring countries such as Moldova and the Baltic states; but that is not where Mr Putin’s ambitions end. Russia may put nuclear warheads into space. Its drones and cyber-warriors allow it to project force beyond its borders. Its disinformation industry spreads lies and confusion. This malign combination has destabilised countries in the Sahel and propped up despots in Syria and central Africa. It could also sway some of the plethora of elections the world will see this year. Or we could focus on the violence Mr Putin is doing to his own people. Having taken over in 1999, he rolled back Russian democracy, especially after young, urban Russians staged mass protests in the 2010s. Textbooks and the media promote a seductive narrative of nationalism and Russian victimhood. Dissent at home has been strangled. The mutinous Yevgeny Prigozhin was blown from the sky and Mr Putin’s most charismatic political rival, Alexei Navalny, was murdered in the gulag in February. Many in the West hoped that Western sanctions and Mr Putin’s blunders in Ukraine might doom his regime. Yet as our study this week of life in Vladivostok shows, it looks solid. Russia’s economy has been re-engineered. Oil exports bypass sanctions and are shipped to the global south. Western brands from BMW to H&M have been replaced with Chinese and local substitutes. A prudent working assumption is that Mr Putin will be in power for years. We believe that outward aggression and inward repression are part of the same impulse. Mr Putin blames the West for challenges to his rule, and seeks to safeguard his regime by shutting out Western influence and trying to unite the Russian people in a struggle against a caricature of America and NATO. At home and abroad, when words fail, he will use fear or violence. Those gloomy thoughts led us to this photograph of Red Square. You see it as if through a tunnel, drained of colour. St Basil’s Cathedral looms over the cobblestones. A tense, silhouetted couple walk away from the camera holding hands—not, it seems, out of love so much as for consolation. Cover image • View large image (“America’s pumped-up economy”) • View large image (“Inside Russia