"I think we get on incredibly well together," Hockey said. "And the president was extraordinarily generous to us with a state visit."

Hockey, in his lecture, warned the U.S. against isolationism and urged its government to ink "free and fair" trade deals that reestablish the United States' presence around the world.

"We'd like to think that all of the initiatives being taken at the moment by the U.S. are about having fairer trade, which we support, but we wouldn't like to see, you know, the United States head down the wrong path on a permanent basis," Hockey told the Post-Dispatch.

Hockey defined the "wrong path" as the United States becoming "a more isolationist economy that puts up trade barriers that at the end of the day hurt the rest of the world, but most significantly will hurt Americans over the medium term."

Hockey, speaking on climate change, stopped short of urging the United States to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, which it withdrew from in 2017.

"It'll take a global effort to respond to a global challenge," he said. "I think there's a lot of politics and there's a lot of ideology around the entire debate. What's indisputable is that the climate is changing, it's causing enormous pressures on Mother Earth and we all need to do as much as we can to ease those pressures."

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