The Obami have finally, it seems, figured out who is boss in Honduras. When last we left the Obama foreign-policy mavens, they were crowing about a deal to restore Hugo Chavez’s ally to the presidency. But they did allow the Honduran Congress to vote on Manuel Zelaya’s reinstatement. Belatedly, the Obama team (after designating the removal of Zelaya with the consent of the very Honduran Congress a “coup”) seemed willing to grant the Hondurans some say in their own affairs. How magnanimous. But the Honduran Congress doesn’t want Zelaya back; they ousted him, after all.

So there is no deadline on the vote to decide Zelaya’s reinstatement. And now Zelaya is miffed. The State Department is sympathetic but unalarmed:

In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said Wednesday that the United States considers what happened in Honduras a coup and that Zelaya should be reinstated, but he said the focus now should be on implementing last week’s deal between the ousted president’s representatives and the interim government of Roberto Micheletti.

“We’ve made our position on President Zelaya and his restitution clear. We believe he should be restored to power,” Kelly said. “Our focus now is on implementing this process and creating an environment wherein Hondurans themselves can address the issue of restitution and resolve for themselves this Honduran problem.”

The reactions are enlightening. A college professor sneers that “the U.S. negotiators may have underestimated the sheer nutso chaos of Honduran politics.” “Nutso” to oust Chavez’s pawn before he could effect his power grab and “nutso” to refuse taking him back? Hmm. Others have a different take:

Juan Carlos Hidalgo, project coordinator for Latin America at Washington-based Cato Institute, said he doesn’t expect Hondurans to be swayed by U.S. pressure. “If Congress doesn’t reinstate Zelaya, it certainly will be a diplomatic embarrassment for the United States since they pressured so much for his reinstatement and even threatened to not recognize the election results,” said Hidalgo. “But not recognizing a popular vote was a dead-end road for the U.S. and they knew it.”

The bottom line: the Obama team picked the wrong horse, found itself in a diplomatic dead end, found a mechanism to abandon its failed gambit, and now supports elections — the very position that the Honduran interim government and the administration’s critics have been urging from the beginning. Well, in fairness, it is a display of diplomatic genius compared with Obama’s Middle East policy.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, November 5th, 2009 at 4:47 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.