It seems that Obama’s Honduras policy isn’t going as planned. This report explains:

Honduras’ de facto government remains dead-set against the return of Manuel Zelaya as the country’s president, defying the Obama administration and disregarding the U.S. sanctions imposed last week against the poor Central American nation.

In fact, the government of interim President Roberto Micheletti appears to be digging in its heels against Zelaya by circulating accusations the ousted president illegally used public money to keep horses, buy watches and jewelry and repair his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

You have to hand it to the Honduran pro-constitutional forces — the ones for whom adherence to term limits (quite an important principle given the region’s history of strongmen) is worth defying the best efforts of the U.S. to meddle, cajole, and bully the small democracy into submission. After all, as the report notes, “The U.S. is the 800-pound gorilla in Honduras; more than half of Honduras’ trade is with the U.S. The U.S. also has a military base in Honduras, the brightest Hondurans study in the U.S. and Hondurans speak English as a point of pride.”

The situation in Honduras is instructive. Some contend that the Obama administration is not really all that ideologically minded and that once those in charge of U.S. policy (not sure who they are, exactly) see the world in action, they are bright enough to react and readjust to events as they find them. According to this school of thought, the Obama team is teachable and will shed troublesome rhetoric and unrealistic expectations of our adversaries as that rhetoric and those expectations prove to be out of kilter with the motives and behavior of other actors on the world stage. Well, not when it comes to Honduras.

Here, one might almost have excused the administration for getting it wrong initially. It looked, if one didn’t bother to read up on the Honduran constitution, vaguely like a “coup,” and we’re generally against coups. It therefore follows that the U.S. might raise a fuss and try to return to the status quo. But the passage of time has made crystal clear that Honduran democracy and the rule of law — the very things we ostensibly want to preserve — are not served by backing Zelaya. But rather than recognize the error of their ways and gracefully get off the stage, the Obama team has dug in, cutting off aid and canceling visas from the interim government.

It is the reaction of a foreign-policy team immune to facts and unable to unclench its grasp on a very bad idea, in this case the notion that we might out-Chavez Hugo Chavez by championing the power-grabbing socialist. This doesn’t bode well for the defenders of the Honduran constitution, but the real concern is that this is instructive of the Obama team’s determination to defend its skewed worldview at all costs and in defiance of real-world developments. It is not only intensely ideological but also frightfully stubborn.

Let’s hope that whoever masterminded the Honduran policy isn’t emblematic of the thinking more generally in the Obama administration. And perhaps there are lonely voices within the administration who can point to this abject failure in order to steer the White House to a more fact-based foreign policy. But it might be that no one is listening and that no one is learning. Unfortunately, those hard-nosed realists we were promised, at least for now, are nowhere to be seen.