“He may be an S.O.B., but he’s our S.O.B.” That quip — of uncertain origin, but often traced to Franklin D. Roosevelt about Nicaragua’s ruthless dictator Anastasio Somoza — became a shorthand excuse for dubious American foreign policies during the 1930s and the Cold War.  It touched policy in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and particularly Latin America.  It backfired often — notably in Central America, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran — but was never fully abandoned. 

Now it appears that the State Department has given the strategy new life.  In Honduras, President Juan Orlando Hernández, having twisted his country’s laws to allow himself to seek re-election and having presided over a vote count so suspicious that his opponents and international observers called for a new election, has now officially been pronounced the winner by the country’s discredited electoral commission.  That allows him to achieve his second, unlawful, term after all. 

To all of which, the administration in Washington has turned a blind eye. 

Why?  Perhaps the Trump administration, like the Obama administration before it, believes Mr. Hernández to be good for Honduras and American interests there.  A Honduran military base houses hundreds of United States military personnel.  Maybe that outweighs a list of authoritarian actions that Mr. Hernández and his government minister, Arturo Corrales, have committed for years to keep themselves in power. 

The list is long: widely documented corruption, illegal changes to the Constitution, documented ties to drug traffickers, attacks on a free press, criminalization of peaceful protests, repeated violations of human rights by security forces, one of the highest crime rates in the world, manipulation of homicide statistics that affect Honduras’s access to United States aid and a permissive attitude toward political assassinations.