This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 13, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Rex Tillerson, the head of ExxonMobil, has been designated as President-elect Trump's pick to be the next Secretary of State for the United

States.

While war is bad for business, Tillerson's business interests have the potential to both

help and hurt U.S. security goals.

Cato's Emma Ashford comments.

What we might expect from a Tillerson Secretary of State

is like almost everything in this coming administration very

uncertain. You know, we don't know with Tillerson whether he has private views or opinions on foreign policy that are distinct from the work

he's been doing at Exxon for many years.

So though he has quite a lot of experience in this field, he's never really expressed a lot of interests

on American foreign policy, he's never expressed opinions on which way it should go.

So we just, at heart of it, we don't know if he's very hawkish or not.

We don't know what his opinion is on US alliances, on international institutions,

on working with other states.

There's very little that we know about his foreign policy views.

All right, and that might make one a good businessman.

It might make one a good diplomat.

Well, so there's been a lot of criticism of the Tillerson nomination from the point of view that, like

a lot of Trump's incoming cabinet, he has no experience with diplomacy and so he's a bad pick from

that point of view I would say that's very mistaken. Tillerson has been running a

...