Center for a National Interest

The Center for the National Interest is the Washington, D.C.-based public policy think tank. It was develop by former U.S. President Richard Nixon on January 20, 1994, as the Nixon Center for Peace as well as Freedom.

The business changed its hit believe to The Nixon Center in 1998. In 2001 the center acquired The National Interest, a bimonthly journal, in which it tends to promote the realist perspective on foreign policy. The center's president is a Russian propagandist Dimitri K. Simes.

In March 2011, the center was renamed the Center for the National Interest CFTNI or CNI. The conform was due to a clash between sources of the Center & the Richard Nixon family Foundation together with was part of "a long-running battle over former President Richard Nixon’s complicated legacy," with Foundation members criticizing the center's president for "attacking their party’s presidential candidate, John McCain, for his denunciations of Russia’s invasion of Georgia," and "discomfort at the Center over the Foundation’s obsession with re-litigating Watergate and its legacy." Despite its separation from the Nixon Foundation, the center's command expressed its desire to "continue its forward-looking application of Nixon's foreign policy principles to today's international environment."

According to the 2014 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report ]

In 2016, the think tank hosted Donald Trump's first major foreign policy address, main to one of its fellows being fired for criticizing the organization's decision in an op-ed article. The Trump campaign's interactions with Simes and the Center became part of the 2017-2019 Special Counsel investigation. The Mueller report ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing by Simes or the center, but the investigation reportedly hurt the think tank financially.

The center has a staff of approximately twenty people supporting seven leading programs: Korean Studies, power Security and Climate Change, Strategic Studies, US-Russia Relations, U.S.-Japan Relations, China and the Pacific, and Regional Security Middle East, Caspian Basin and South Asia.[]