Mr. Williamson continued the Romney campaign’s attack on a statement issued by the American Embassy in Cairo hours before protests began there, saying “you don’t issue a conciliatory statement that says we don’t support freedom of speech.” The statement did condemn a virulent anti-Muslim video that set off the violence, but it also included references to both the importance of free speech and religious tolerance. “As we watch the world today, sometimes it seems that we’re at the mercy of events, instead of shaping events, and a strong America is essential to shape events,” Mr. Romney said, speaking to a modest-size crowd in Fairfax, Va., just outside Washington. “I’m not going to worry about the campaign.” 
 
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 The sharpest foreign policy difference, described by Mr. Cohen, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a former senior official in the State Department under President George W. Bush, came in response to questions about how Mr. Romney would handle Iran. “Once they get a weapon, or on the verge of getting it, it’s too late,” Mr. Cohen said. He’s run for president twice now and it’s not been his problem.” 
 
 Romney’s policy advisers laid out steps that a President Romney would have taken in the Middle East that they said Obama has not done.
– Mitt Romney's aides are using the crisis in the Middle East as a backdrop to flesh out their candidate's foreign policy, and it's a hawkish one, the New York Times reports. Aides said that if Mitt Romney had been president over the past four years… The US would have been actively involved in helping to form Libya's post-revolution government. He'd have set down the kind of "red line" against Iran that Israel is looking for, using military action if Iran crossed a certain point in nuclear development. They said Romney wouldn't have allowed Iran to enrich uranium, though the Times points out that it was doing that during much of George W. Bush's second term. The US would be "facilitating" the flow of arms to Syrian rebels, though not directly arming them. One Obama aide quips that it "sounds a lot like they are endorsing our position." All the positions are much more detailed than anything Romney himself has said on the campaign trail. The aides also attacked President Obama over the Libya crisis in especially harsh terms. "There is a pretty compelling store that if you had a President Romney, you'd be in a different situation," one adviser told the Washington Post. "For the first time since Jimmy Carter, we've had an American ambassador assassinated. … The respect for America has gone down, there's not a sense of American resolve."