Last night during the debate, Rick Santorum was struggling to express just how disgusted he was with the way the Obama administration had handled the constitutional crisis in Honduras*, and he repeated all of the usual complaints that the administration had “sided with Chavez and Castro.” In fairness, I disagreed with the administration response to Zelaya’s removal from office, but mostly because I regarded this as a Honduran matter that shouldn’t concern us. If the U.S. was, in fact, complicit in ousting Zelaya, that is a far worse instance of interfering in Honduran affairs. Santorum’s criticism focused on Obama and Zelaya is badly dated and has little to do with current U.S. policy. There is a sharply critical op-ed today by Dana Frank, who argues that the Obama administration has been entirely too accommodating to Zelaya’s enemies and too friendly to the new government under Porfirio Lobo:

Why has the State Department thrown itself behind the Lobo administration despite brutal evidence of the regime’s corruption? In part because it has caved in to the Cuban-American constituency of Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and her allies. They have been ferocious about Honduras as a first domino with which to push back against the line of center-left and leftist governments that have won elections in Latin America in the past 15 years. With its American air base, Honduras is also crucial to the United States’ military strategy in Latin America.

Frank seems to be exaggerating U.S. responsibility for problems in Honduras, but there’s no question that Washington has not been siding with Zelaya and his friends in the region since Lobo was elected. It’s true that Lobo’s election stemmed from the situation that followed Zelaya’s removal from office, and it’s also true that the U.S. accepts Lobo’s government as legitimate while most other regional governments do not. Obama’s policy towards Honduras over the last two years is now practically the opposite of what Santorum et al. believe it has been.

* It is a measure of how ridiculous our foreign policy debates are that what should have been an internal Honduran matter has become a regular talking point for some American politicians.