General James Mattis. | TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images Ex-military leaders at Hoover Institution say Trump statements threaten America's interests

STANFORD, California — Some of the nation’s leading experts on foreign policy, military and economic issues at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution say Republican Donald Trump’s statements on issues like nuclear proliferation and Muslim immigration are untenable and are already doing damage to America's interests.

General James Mattis, the former commander of the U.S. Central Command who oversaw all operations involving 200,000-plus American military personnel in the Middle East and South-Central Asia from 2010-2013, told POLITICO this week that he considers Trump’s assessment of NATO as “obsolete" to be "kooky."


Regarding Trump’s contention that U.S. allies are not paying their “fair share” of costs to support the alliance, Mattis called the claim “about as kooky as [if] a president were to call our allies freeloaders.”

“Some of those allies have lost more troops per capita in Afghanistan than we have,’’ said Mattis, who also served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation, and is now a Distinguished Fellow at the Hoover Institution. “Some of them are spending 20 percent of their national budget on defense.”

On Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, Mattis — who rarely gives media interviews — was also sharply critical, saying that such talk prompts U.S. allies to think “we have lost faith in reason.”

Asked about the reaction in the Middle East to Trump’s suggestion, Mattis said, “They think we’ve completely lost it. This kind of thing is causing us great damage right now, and it’s sending shock waves through this international system.“

Mattis was among a group of leading Hoover fellows who sat down with POLITICO to mark the publication of their new book, “Blueprint for America.” The work was edited by former Secretary of State George Shultz, who called it an effort to offer “a nonpartisan roadmap” for solutions to some of America’s most pressing economic, political and foreign policy problems.

The authors — including Shultz himself, as well as economists John Taylor and John Cochrane — warned that American leadership in the last decades has entered a “strategy-free environment” in which economic and foreign policy has become increasingly unfocused and mired in partisan politics.

But even as experts from Hoover — a required stop for many GOP candidates seeking counsel on policy matters — called for more effective governance from both parties, some members of the group reserved their deepest concerns, and sharpest criticism, for Trump.

Among those members were Admiral James Ellis Jr., whose nearly four decades in the Navy culminated in a role as commander of the United States Strategic Command, in global command of U.S. strategic and space forces. He delivered a scathing assessment of Trump’s suggestion that Japan and South Korea “would be better off” if they had nuclear weapons.

“It’s an anathema to me that people would cavalierly address the concept of Japan and South Korea having nuclear stockpiles,’’ said Ellis, who until 2012 was president and CEO of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and is also now a Distinguished Fellow at Hoover.

Ellis said such talk represents a direct reversal of the nuclear disarmament goals that American leaders like Shultz and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, former Defense Secretary William Perry and former Senator Sam Nunn — "have been working on for decades.”

Hoover Institution research fellow Kori Schake, a former senior policy and national defense adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 campaign, called Trump’s remarks on nukes “just nonsense ... irresponsible.”

“Encouragement of proliferation by an American president would overturn 70 years of American foreign policy,’’ she said. “The kinds of things he’s saying would not only be disastrous if adopted as policies -- they’re actually damaging to the United States and our friends around the world.”

She noted that Japan “has been a very close, very good ally to our country for three generations now,’’ and added that “Donald Trump’s kind of reckless sees-no-difference-between-Japan-and-China [approach] makes no distinction between countries that share our values versus countries that don’t, between countries that support our interests and countries that don’t.”

"It would be understandable if the Japanese began to hedge their bets in fear of Donald Trump being elected, because it would actually be really damaging to their interests,’’ she said. “So just by the way he is flippantly treating longstanding policies of mutual interest to us and our allies, he is actually hurting America’s foreign relations already.”

Equally concerning, Ellis said, are the effects of such talk on other United States allies.

“Once they lack certainty, or confidence"’ that America’s resolve on the issue of nuclear disarmament and its “integrity is not what it once was,’’ he warned, then “I guarantee you, our potential adversaries are undercutting that.”

It is likely that “the Chinese are already whispering in the Japanese ear: 'Do you really think the Americans would go to war, supporting you over a pile of rocks in the South China Sea?' [They’re] trying to inject that uncertainty," Ellis said. “And the same thing is happening in Russia. 'Can you trust the Americans, will they be there for you? Aren’t we a better source of security relationships?'”

While Shultz declined to criticize Trump directly, the former Secretary of State, who has held four federal cabinet posts, strongly defended the benefits of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a trade relationship he said was set in motion by the Reagan Administration before it was ultimately signed by President Clinton. Trump has criticized NAFTA as "the worst trade deal in the history of the country."

"Our imports from Mexico are 40 percent U.S. content,'' Shultz said. "There’s no other trade relationship even remotely like that. So why do we want to demolish our relations with our next door neighbors? These are our trading partners. And when it comes to security, if we can keep North America reasonable secure, at least we have a base."

The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.