Tom Lantos - Foreign Affairs Issues

Foreign Affairs Issues

Lantos served as the chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Through its more than 20 years of work, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus — of which Lantos was co-chair with Representative Frank Wolf — has covered a wide range of human rights issues, including speaking for Christians in Saudi Arabia and Sudan to practice their faith, helping Tibetans to retain their culture and religion in Tibet, and advocating for other minorities worldwide. Lantos’s efforts to protect religious freedom in 2004 resulted in a bill to attempt to stop the spread of anti-semitism.

Lantos was involved with his colleagues on the International Relations Committee on many decisions that affected other aspects of American foreign policy. Lantos spoke out against waste, fraud and abuse in the multi-billion-dollar U.S. reconstruction program in Iraq, and warned that the U.S. could lose Afghanistan to the Taliban if the Bush administration failed to take decisive action to halt the current decline in political stability there.

Lantos, as the ranking Democrat on the International Relations Committee, tried to disrupt U.S. military aid to Egypt, argued that the Egyptian military had made insufficient efforts to stop the flow of money and weapons across the Egyptian border to Hamas in Gaza, and had not contributed troops to internationally-supported peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Lantos was a strong advocate for Israel.