Robert Gates, former President Barack Obama’s secretary of defense, slammed President Joe Biden during an interview that aired on Sunday, and praised former President Donald Trump when it came to foreign policy.
Gates made the remarks during an interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” with co-host Anderson Cooper, saying Biden has “gotten a lot wrong.”
“He opposed every one of Ronald Reagan’s military programs to contest the Soviet Union,” Gates said. “He opposed the first Gulf War. That list goes on. Now I will say that in the Obama administration, he and I obviously had significant differences over Afghanistan.”
Gates listed a couple of areas on which he and Biden saw eye to eye before saying that Biden made a mistake in Afghanistan.
When asked what would happen if China moved in on Taiwan, Gates said that the U.S. needed to focus on deterrence and strengthening Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.
“I think this is a place where President Trump got it right,” Gates said. “He basically awakened Americans, and I would say especially the business community, to a China that — the assumptions about which we had gotten wrong. And the assumption for 40 years was that a richer China would be a freer China, and that’s clearly not going to happen. But there’s another piece of this puzzle with China, and that is the economic side. Chinese now manage something like three dozen major ports around the world. They are the biggest trading partner of more than half of South America. They are everywhere. And what are we doing in these non-military arenas to compete with the Chinese?”
