The Londoner

Enrique Peña Nieto takes office tomorrow, Dec. 1, as the next President of Mexico —whose young and otherwise successful democracy is beset by narco-bloodshed (60,000 murders in the past six years), an underachieving economy (average annual growth of only 2% since 2000) and a feeling that its Latin American leadership role has been eclipsed by its fast-developing South American rival, Brazil . Peña, 46, the popular former governor of central Mexico state, convinced Mexican voters that his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which ruled Mexico from 1929 to 2000 as a corrupt, one-party dictatorship, has righted itself enough to right Mexico. (Read TIME International’s cover story on Peña , available to subscribers.) He spoke with TIME’s Latin America bureau chief, Tim Padgett, and Mexico reporter Dolly Mascareñas at his transition headquarters in Mexico City. Excerpts (translated from Spanish): TIME: Your presidency marks a critical moment for Mexico. What are the...

T he great 19th-century satirist Ambrose Bierce defined a revolution as “an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.” He would understand events in Egypt very well. In the signature revolution of the Arab Spring, the country turned its back on a secular dictatorship only to fall into the arms of what looks like a budding Muslim Brotherhood dictatorship. Meet the new pharaoh, same as the old pharaoh. Except Egypt’s old form of misgovernment may soon look progressive by comparison. Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi’s decree neutering the judiciary is the latest act in his steady consolidation of power. While he assiduously builds a dictatorship, the Obama administration just as assiduously tells itself bedtime stories. It’s a perfect division of labor — he goes about his empire-building with a clear-eyed realism; we consider it through a gauzy lens of delusion. Since the end of Hosni Mubarak, the air has been thick with descriptions of the Muslim Brotherhoo...

. Faced with major protests to President Mohamed Mursi’s decree placing himself above the law, the Muslim Brotherhood party is today trying to cram a draft constitution through the constitutional assembly in a single marathon session. A shotgun constitution is a terrible way to produce popular legitimacy and effective democracy. Mursi’s actions didn’t come out of nowhere. Fearing that the nation’s pro-army constitutional court would dissolve the assembly writing the new document, he issued a decree last week that put his actions above judicial review. This overreach smacked of dictatorship, and hundreds of thousands of protesters filled Cairo’s Tahrir Square to object. A little-noticed feature of the decree, however, states that Mursi’s special powers would expire when the new constitution was ratified. Now, by getting the constitution in place fast, Mursi and the Brotherhood hope to show the protesters and the world that they don’t seek to subvert democracy but to sustain it. Onc...

The barrage of international criticism against President Mohamed Morsi's latest constitutional declaration , which places him above the law, oversimplifies Egypt's situation and largely comes down to one sentiment: "I told you so." The dark forces of Islamism have reneged on their commitment to democracy (as everyone expected), and are being fought tooth and nail by the gallant supporters of liberty and legality. How much simpler can it get? Just a scratch beneath the surface reveals that this newest wave in the two-year turmoil is yet another byproduct of the paradox that has haunted the revolt from the start: how can a regime be overthrown using the very same crooked laws and legal agencies it had set up for its own protection? And how can a democratic regime emerge through the ballot box, if Egyptians simply insist on voting for whoever or whatever the Islamists endorse? Morsi, the country's first democratically elected pr...

Some West Bankers may still feel this morning as if they’ve just won the $587 million Powerball jackpot — but they’ll soon realize that, despite the dazzle of yesterday’s vote at the United Nations, they had the wrong numbers: There’s no grand prize coming. Yes, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas managed to line up an impressive number of General Assembly votes for his resolution naming Palestine as a UN non-member “state.” Some 138 countries supported him; nobody in “Old Europe” opposed. Only America, Canada, the Czech Republic, Panama and several Pacific island states joined Israel in voting nay (with 41 abstentions). EPA How does this help his people? Palestinian chief Mahmoud Abbas celebrating yesterday’s vote in New York to upgrade his non-state’s status. And, yes, the world media will wax poetic on Abbas’ diplomatic “victory.” His carefully crafted resolution enshrined Palestine as a non-member UN “state” within the 1967 borders...

On November 14, President Obama vigorously defended U.N. ambassador Susan Rice during a press conference in the White House's Rose Garden, perhaps signaling that he was unworried by the possibility of a drawn-out battle with Republicans looking to block Rice's possible nomination as secretary of state. Rice, who has been criticized for her promoting a now-disproven explanation for the deadly attack on an American diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, apparently has the full support of the president that could nominate her for the highest diplomatic position in the land. Things are not quite as amicable at U.N. headquarters. As the conflict in the Eastern DRC escalated , and as two U.N. reports provided extensive evidence of official Rwandan and Ugandan support for the M23 rebel group, Rice's delegation blocked any mention of the conflict's most important state actors in a Security Council statement. And in June, the U.S. attempted to delay...

Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government… for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence. — Murray N. Rothbard, The Logic of Action (1997) The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often referred to as the time of the "robber barons." It is a staple of history books to attach this derogatory phrase to such figures as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the great nineteenth-century railroad operators — Grenville Dodge, Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others. To most historians writing on this period, these entrepreneurs committed thinly veiled acts of larceny to enrich themselves at the expense of their customers. Once again we see the...