Acceptable Losses

On several occasions since the election of President Obama, I've worried that our new foreign policy of "restoring" our reputation abroad would in practice involve throwing friends to the wolves in order to please enemies.

I will say that as time has gone on, our president has acted more to my liking, broadly speaking. But my fears about the president early in his administration during the Zelaya Affair over the so-called Honduras coup were correct:

Lots of hypotheses have been floated to explain why the Obama administration went to such extremes last year to try to force Honduras to reinstate deposed president Manuel Zelaya.

Now the release of two WikiLeaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Tegucigalpa strengthens one of those theories: that the U.S. knew Mr. Zelaya was a threat to democratic Honduras but had decided the country should tolerate his constitutional violations in the interest of realpolitik.

Practically speaking, Hugo Chávez was the man to please. After a decade in power, the president of Venezuela's influence around the region was notable. George W. Bush had clashed with him. Barack Obama was out to prove that they could get along, as evidenced by the warm handshake at the Summit of the Americas in Port of Spain in April 2009.

Honduras offered a bonding opportunity. Mr. Zelaya was a protégé of Mr. Chávez. Standing up for him as democratically elected was a way to score points with Latin America's hard left.

 You have to break a few small countries to make an omelet, eh?

Luckily, Honduras was able to resist our efforts to throw them under the bus long enough for our foreign policy establishment to finally do the right thing despite some clueless legal analysis from the new crowd in our embassy there.

But it is handy to know what price the administration was prepared to pay in futile efforts to turn enemies into our friends.

UPDATE: Latin Americans are still waiting for the Obama administration to "restore" our reputation by coming up with a Latin American policy:

Nearly two years have passed since his inauguration, and President Obama has yet to unveil a major policy initiative for Latin America. Regional officials are hoping that Obama ends this neglect in 2011 and increases U.S. engagement.

Well, they're waiting for engagement more nuanced than tossing victims to Hugo Chavez in the hopes he'll learn to stop wanting more victims rather than whetting his appetite.