Thirty years ago the Carter administration made a number of foreign policy blunders that cost the United States dearly. In 1979 alone, four nations fell into the hands of our enemies: Iran, Grenada, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. Is the Obama administration about to make a similar mistake today in Honduras?
All four 1979 defeats eventually took an enormous toll of innocent victims. For the next decade, while working to reverse Carter's ineptitude, the United States paid a high price in lives, treasure and prestige. In Iran, Afghanistan, and to a lesser degree Nicaragua, the United States is still paying a price.
In Iran, for example, the ayatollahs who replaced the Shah continue to kill political enemies, rig elections, support terrorism abroad, and to build an atomic bomb. In each case except Afghanistan, which fell to a Soviet invasion that Jimmy Carter said had surprised him, the United States stood by or even contributed as an authoritarian regime fell, from within, to a totalitarian.
Carter's policy had the best of intentions: to encourage liberalization and democracy in autocratic countries. But, as the late Jeane Kirkpatrick explained in her classic 1979 essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Carter overlooked the fact that we should not help destabilize a government that is facing subversion by an anti-American group or movement.
The Carter-era tragedies could have been avoided if the U.S. government had not been so naive about the intentions of others. Are we about to make the same mistake in Honduras? As Americans, we must hope that the Obama administration does not want its foreign policy to be compared with Carter's and is therefore modifying its earlier stance.
With the best of intentions, the Obama administration put enormous pressure on the de facto Honduran government headed by the former head of the Congress, Roberto Micheletti. The United States insisted on restoring to power the former strongman, Manuel Zelaya because, it said, Zelaya was elected democratically, removed illegally by the military, and thus Micheletti's government was illegitimate. What the United States said was inaccurate and the resulting policy was naive.
Zelaya was elected democratically, but like so many Latin strongmen, once in power he ruled undemocratically. In his elected autocracy, Zelaya joined a group of famous Latin American presidents: Juan Peron (Argentina), Alberto Fujimori (Peru), Jean Bertrand Aristide (Haiti), Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), among others.
Moreover, following Kirkpatrick's prediction, Zelaya had taken Honduras into an anti-American alliance, the so-called Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas, or ALBA, created by Castro and Chavez. ALBA's purpose is to oppose U.S. "hegemony" in this hemisphere by creating a cartel of undemocratic "21st Century Socialist" governments in the model of Castro's Cuba. In addition to Cuba and Venezuela, ALBA includes only Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras and Nicaragua, plus three energy-starved Caribbean island nations, which have been coerced into joining by Chavez's petroleum extortions ("You join, and I'll subsidize your energy; you don't and you pay world prices").
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