Outgoing US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley has said that President Donald Trump's unpredictability and mercurial nature was often an asset in UN diplomacy.

"If I need to pick up the phone and say this is what I'm gonna to do, are you good with this? We kind of partnered in that," she said in an interview on Wednesday.

"And so he would like ratchet up the rhetoric and then I would go back to the ambassadors and say, 'You know he is pretty upset. I can't promise you what he is going to do. I'll tell you, if we do these sanctions, it will keep him from going too far'," Politico quoted Haley as saying.

By harnessing Trump's unpredictability to her advantage in diplomatic negotiations, Haley said she was just "trying to get the job done... by being truthful but also by letting him be unpredictable and not showing our cards".

Haley denied on Wednesday that she was leaving after two years on the job because she had higher political ambitions or because of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, telling in the interview that her life had been a series of "fun surprises" and that she looked forward to "sleeping in".

The former Governor of South Carolina also defended Trump's nominee to succeed her, current State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert, who has been criticised by some for her relative lack of foreign policy experience.

Haley noted that she faced similar criticism when she first accepted her position with the Trump administration.

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