Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief

This week’s cover package combines our latest reporting from the Middle East with reflections on American power. How America handles the conflict between Israel and Hamas will shape geopolitics for years to come. It has sent two aircraft carriers to the region: a 200,000-tonne declaration of support for Israel and a warning to Hizbullah and Iran not to escalate the conflict. No other country could do this.

Even as President Joe Biden hugs Israel close, however, he is urging restraint on its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu, partly to spare Palestinian lives, partly to limit the diplomatic fallout from a ground war in Gaza. Mr Biden rightly calls this an “inflection point”. It will test whether America can adapt to a more complex and threatening world.

How to illustrate this? An inflection point is not much to look at, so our designers offered something more concrete: an American aircraft carrier, loaded with warplanes and churning up the sea behind it. That certainly conveys a sense of American power, but it lacks context. So we tried a carrier in the shape of Israel. This is a striking image. However, our coverage is not just about America’s relationship with Israel; we are also exploring broader trends: how the superpower copes with the chaos sown by Iran and Russia, the rise of transactional powers such as India and Saudi Arabia, and China’s efforts to forge a new world order where the interests of states trump any notion of individual human rights.

One way to illustrate this was to have an American eagle with a globe for an eye. Another was to show the eagle wrapping its wings around Earth. What was missing from these images was a sense of peril. With shells falling on Gaza and a brutal ground assault in the offing, we needed something that suggested war.

An eagle perched on the barrel of an Israeli tank did this clearly and bluntly. The same bird on the blackened branches of a bomb-charred tree is an even stronger image, reminding readers of the inferno that Gaza is becoming.

Perhaps, though, an eagle on a thorn bush works better? Thorns can draw blood, but they also symbolise complex problems. We liked this idea so much that we worked it up into a cover, adding more branches to suggest the tangle of difficulties that the superpower faces.

In the end, though, we came back to Mr Biden. More than any other aspect of government, foreign policy depends on the president—especially when Congress is as dysfunctional as it is today. He is the one who orders aircraft carriers to set sail. His personal rapport with foreign leaders matters: if they trust him, he is more likely to be able to sway them. So we tried a montage of emblems of war and peace around Mr Biden. Then we tried something simpler and more powerful: the president walking through the smoke trails of missiles fired from multiple directions. This was the image we were looking for. But something was odd about the photograph of Mr Biden. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he looked unusually cadaverous. Had we used this image, some readers might have thought we were making a point about his age. So we found a better picture to complete a stark and memorable cover.