On Gates’ South American trip, little interest in South America
Published: November 22, 2010
ARLINGTON, Va. – One of the incentives for Pentagon reporters to travel overseas with Defense Secretary Robert Gates is that it offers rare face time with the Obama administration’s senior national security official. Gates has not appeared in the Pentagon briefing room since September.
No surprise, then, that during a four-day trip through Chile and Bolivia, reporters are using the opportunity to ask the defense secretary few questions about Chile and Bolivia, according to Pentagon-released transcripts. Instead, they asked the top defense leader about the top defense news stories: the weekend’s major NATO summit and the 2014 date for leaving Afghanistan, North Korean nuclear weapons developments, Mexico’s raging border war, and in Washington, two major policy items on deck in the lame duck Congress: a nuclear weapons treaty with Russia, and the repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
At one media roundtable in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, only seven of 17 questions put to Gates referenced the Americas (mostly Iranian-Bolivian relations, or the pan-American drug trade). Four questions came on North Korea, two on “don’t ask, don’t tell”, two on START, the nuclear treaty, and that’s not counting follow up questions.
A day earlier, Gates and Chilean Defense Minister Ravinet de la Fuente, in Santiago, took 3-and-3 questions from reporters (three from Gates’ traveling press, three from local national press). The two Pentagon reporters asked him about the meaning of 2014 in Afghanistan and START. The third U.S. reporter, a Washington-based AFP correspondent on the Spanish-language desk, asked about Venezuela constructing a nuclear plant.
When reporters traveled 20 hours to the other side of the world earlier in November, at a joint press conference in Malaysia with Defense Minister Datuk Seri Zahid Hamid, Gates was asked about Iraq, al-Qaida and China. One question was on Malaysian military exercises with the U.S.
In Australia? A few asked about that country’s military efforts and regional security. A few more asked about cyber security, Afghanistan, Lisbon, Karzai and Pakistan.
The last time Gates sat in the Pentagon briefing room to give a chance to those defense and national security reporters who are not on the traveling rotation: Sept. 23.
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