Center for the National Interest

Josh Rogin at The Washington Post

For Dimitri Simes, the Mueller report is a vindication of himself and the Center for the National Interest, the small think tank that played an outsized role in influencing the Trump campaign’s foreign policy. But even though Simes, president and chief executive of the center, was cleared of wrongdoing, damage was done. Some inside his organization say Simes shares the blame — for overplaying the Washington influence-peddling game and cozying up to Team Trump.

As the Mueller report and various news reports have spelled out, Simes was engaging in activities that are both legal and widespread in Washington: back-channel communications with foreign officials, wielding influence on behalf of corporate interests and privately helping political campaigns while running a “nonpartisan” organization. However, those activities became a focus of federal and congressional investigations and tons of media scrutiny. Simes said he does not think he should be held responsible for any of it.
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Simes emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1973 at age 24 in search of intellectual and political freedom, he said, after being twice expelled from college for protesting Russia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. He soon became an informal adviser to President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and a U.S. citizen. In 1994, when Nixon founded what was then called the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, he chose Simes to run it.

“He was not a great lover of think tanks,” Simes said of Nixon. “He knew I would not go with the flow.”
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The center’s reserve fund, which had been almost $4 million in December 2017, was depleted to just $1.2 million by March of this year, according to internal documents I obtained. Simes told me that when the center split from the Richard Nixon Foundation in 2011, it received money that served as a rainy-day fund — and that this qualified as a rainy day.

Simes said the center’s magazine, the National Interest, is profitable and the think tank has a new high-six-figure donor, so it can survive and even thrive in its mission to promote a realist U.S. foreign policy approach.