Foreign Policy | featured news

A Republican-led House oversight committee opens hearings Wednesday on diplomatic security in Benghazi, where a U.S. ambassador and three others were killed on Sept. 11, adding fuel to a political debate over the issue in the final weeks before presidential elections... GOP lawmakers deny they are trying to embarrass the Obama administration before the election.

What the Republican nominee’s campaign billed as a major foreign policy address didn’t have much new in it and left some analysts unimpressed. The speech, they said, was much like Romney’s previous swings at laying out a foreign policy -- couched in broad ideology and big ambitions and lacking the specifics for how he’d bring any of them about.

The address mostly repackaged things Romney has said before, sometimes with greater precision. The Republican, who has stumbled in past efforts to articulate his foreign policy, offered few specific ways he would change the Obama administration’s current approach. Although he made broad critiques of Obama’s “passivity,” Romney did not call for any new armed intervention in any Mideast conflict.

South Korea has reached a landmark agreement with the United States to extend the range of Seoul's ballistic missiles by more than twice the current limit to counter the threat from North Korea, the government said on Sunday.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday vowed to pursue a full accounting of the deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi "wherever that leads," but cautioned that it could take time for a complete picture to emerge.

Leaders of a House committee said Tuesday that U.S. diplomats in Libya made repeated requests for increased security for the consulate in Benghazi and were turned down by officials in Washington.

The presidential campaigns and their allies began the week with aggressive attacks on the candidates’ records ahead of the first presidential debate on Wednesday. In an opinion article published Monday in The Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney accused President Obama of foreign policy failures, saying that the president had allowed the nation’s influence to atrophy by “stepping away” from American allies overseas.

The Obama campaign has attacked Republican Mitt Romney this week for having investments in China, saying it is inappropriate for a presidential nominee to be investing so much money there. Former Ohio governor Ted Strickland (D), a campaign co-chairman, said it “defies logic.” “It may not be illegal, it may not be unethical, but it is unseemly,” he said in an interview. “It just leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reassured Egypt's new Islamist president on Monday that the United States would forge ahead with plans to expand economic assistance despite anti-American protests that cast new shadows over U.S. engagement with the region.

The White House criticized Republican claims that President Obama called an ambassador's death a 'bump in the road." White House press secretary Jay Carney said Obama was referring to Middle East unrest in general, and called the GOP claim "both desperate and offensive."