Written By : John Hawkins

Because Barack Obama has been so dangerous, dishonest, and incompetent on the home front, many people have lost sight of how much of a bumbler he has been abroad. Seriously, we’ve got Jimmy Carter redux on the foreign policy front.

Obama got juked out of his shoes by the Russians, he has already taken too long to make a decision in Afghanistan, Pakistan is falling apart on his watch, Iran is on its way to building nukes, and Honduras — wow, Honduras. Honduras is not the most important of U.S. allies. Nor is what’s going on there nearly as important as what’s happening in say, Iran or North Korea.

However, the ineptitude of the Obama Administration has been so startling that it’s worth talking about.

First off, crazy pants Hugo Chavez wannabe, Manuel Zelaya, was trying to set up an illegal rigged election to make himself “dictator-for-life” in that country. The Congress, the military, and courts of that democratic nation weren’t having it and in accordance with their constitution, they removed him from office — and then exiled him. There was no military takeover. There was no strong man put in place. A politician from Zelaya’s own political party took over and new elections are scheduled for later this month.

At that point, Barack sided against the people who wanted democracy in Honduras by demanding Honduras stick their own version of Castro back in office. Honduras held out as long as it could, but when nations around the world, including the U.S., were saying that they wouldn’t accept the results of a new election in November unless Zelaya was put back in power, they apparently came to the conclusion that there was no other way out and gave in. What happened then was rather puzzling:

Ousted president Manuel Zelaya, who was expelled by the military in June, said in a telephone interview that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had assured him as recently as last week that the U.S. government was seeking his return to the presidency. But he said that U.S. pressure had eased in recent days and that he no longer had faith in the agreement.

…The Obama administration has invested its credibility in the Oct. 30 accord, which was reached after Clinton dispatched a senior diplomatic team to bring the two sides together. But the agreement started to fray within days, with each side interpreting the vaguely worded document its own way. Key American lawmakers, and Zelaya’s followers, were startled by remarks by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas A. Shannon Jr. last week that the U.S. government would recognize the election results irrespective of whether the ousted Honduran president was returned to office promptly.

“The State Department’s abrupt change of policy towards Honduras last week — recognizing the elections scheduled for Nov. 29 even if the coup regime does not meet its commitments under the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord — caused the collapse of an accord it helped negotiate,” said Frederick L. Jones, a spokesman for Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

In other words, after bending Honduras over a barrel and practically forcing them to agree to put Zelaya back in office, the Obama Administration essentially said “never mind” right as they were about to get what they wanted. That goes beyond incoherent all the way to schizophrenic and that sort of unpredictability, weakness, and poor judgment is being seen across the board in the way that the Obama Administration is handling foreign affairs.

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