Dimitri Simes


Dimitri Kostantinovich Simes is the president and CEO of The Center for the National Interest and publisher of its foreign policy bi-monthly magazine, The National Interest. Simes was selected to lead the Center in 1994 by former President Richard Nixon, to whom he served as an informal foreign policy advisor and with whom he traveled regularly to Russia and other former Soviet states as well as Western and Central Europe.
Before the center was established, Simes served as chairman of the Center for Russian and Eurasian Programs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was also a senior associate. Earlier, he was the director of the Soviet and East European Research Program and a Research Professor of Soviet Studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University. Prior to his work at SAIS, Simes was a senior research fellow and subsequently the director of Soviet Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In addition to teaching at SAIS, Simes taught at the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University.

Biography

Simes was born in Moscow in 1947. He was adopted by the prominent human rights lawyers in the Soviet Union. His mother, Dina Kaminskaya, was born in Dnipro, Ukraine, and his father, Konstantin Simis, was born in Odessa, Ukraine. In 1977, his mother was expelled from the Soviet Union for working as a lawyer for Soviet dissidents. Simes graduated with an M.A. in history from Moscow State University. From 1967 to 1972, he was a research assistant and later a research associate at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations where he also studied at a post-graduate level prior to emigrating to the U.S. in 1973.
Simes authored a book After the Collapse: Russia Seeks its Place as a Great Power. He was a columnist for The Christian Science Monitor, and the Los Angeles Times Syndicate. He has served as a consultant to the National Intelligence Council as well as to CBS and NBC.
In February 2015, Dimitri Simes met with Russian president Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials in Moscow. As publisher of The National Interest, Simes was also involved in arranging Trump's April 27, 2016, speech at the Mayflower Hotel. In the speech, Trump outlined his vision for American foreign policy and called for greater cooperation with Russia.
In September 2018, historian Yuri Felshtinsky published an article about Simes' past encounters with unregistered Russian agent Maria Butina.
In April of 2020, Simes wrote the cover story for The National Interest in which he called the coronavirus crisis a "perfect storm" which inflicted significant damage due to a series of domestic and international failures to preempt and respond to the outbreak.
Simes resides in Washington, DC, but remotely serves as a moderator of the Moscow-based political program Большая игра on Channel One Russia, together with Vyacheslav Nikonov.

Works