A former security adviser has reminded President Rodrigo Duterte that a successful president is one who can conduct himself like a statesman.

"It’s true what the president said: I was not elected to be a statesman; I was elected as president. But a successful president is a statesman," Jose Almonte, who served under former President Fidel V. Ramos, said on ANC's Headstart Friday.

Almonte added, a successful president has to be a statesman "by definition," noting that "a statesman is a man of that state—a state’s man. Man of the state—the state are the people, the country, and the government."

"If you detach yourself from that, who are you as president?," he said.

But Almonte rated the first 100 days of the Duterte presidency as excellent because Duterte supposedly addressed three essential issues—ending internal war with communist rebels, repairing broken politics, and leveling the playing field in land and landless.

Almonte emphasized, there are two factors that can “derail the president’s noble intent": the anti-narcotics campaign with the extrajudicial killings, and the external relations the country is pursuing.

"The external relations of the Philippines has to be handled really with caution, with vision, and with great imagination because we are not an island," he said.

"Of course, we are friends of the United States for a long time, and the EU and others, but it does not mean that we cannot be friends with others, China, Russia," he added.

"The general principle is let us be friends with everybody," he said.

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