Trump's picks for national security team quite strong: Gates

The national security team picks of the new US President Donald Trump are quite strong, former Defence Secretary Robert Gates today said and emphasised that the new administration would have to come out with initiatives to reach out to Asian countries.
"I think that his picks for the national security team are really quite strong. (James) Mattis at (Department of) Defence and John Kelly at Homeland Security both worked for me and I have the highest regard for them," Gates told MSNBC.
Gates also praised Rex Tillerson, former Exxon CEO, for the position of Secretary of State.
"I was one of the introducers at his hearing in the Foreign Relations Committee and I addressed this directly," he said, responding to a question on Tillerson's relationship with the Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"I think that because he was a successful businessman in negotiating with the Russians, who better to negotiate with Vladimir Putin and the Russians than somebody who actually knows who they are, knows how they negotiate, knows how they do business. As I said at the time, I think Rex Tillerson's only goal is going to be to do what's in the best interest of the US," Gates said.
On the new CIA Director, Gates said it is really Mike Pompeo's challenge to figure out how to convince the President that CIA is an important asset for him and for him to figure out how the agency can best support Trump in the way that is congenial to the way he makes decisions.

"Every President deals with intelligence briefings and with the intelligence community in a different way and some have taken personal briefings. When President Carter was in office he never saw a CIA briefing. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor, took the President's daily brief in to him every day," he said.

On Trump abandoning Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), he said the administration needs to have some kind of initiatives to reach out to them.
"I think the administration is going to have to come up with some initiatives to reach out to Asian countries to try and establish if not a multilateral relationship, a bilateral relationship, economically and so on," he said.

"That the disappearance of TPP creates a vacuum and the Chinese are going to fill that vacuum in Asia unless we come up with some ideas on how to replace it with something that may be bilateral but that demonstrates we are still out there, we're still engaged, and the area is very important to us economically," Gates said.