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On Wednesday, however, Trump found himself among a roomful of policy wonks when he delivered his first major foreign policy address at the Mayflower Hotel under the auspices of a Washington establishment think tank: the Center for the National Interest. Originally known as the Nixon Center, the former president’s once-eponymous institution is a hub of foreign policy “realism,” a doctrine of restraint and accommodation that is making a comeback in the post-George W. Bush age of American world-weariness.
Trump’s speech — introduced by Zalmay Khalilzad, a former Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations, Afghanistan and Iraq and about as establishment a figure as one finds in the Republican foreign policy firmament — represents the latest phase of a makeover strategy implemented by Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican aide whom Trump hired last month to professionalize his improvisational, unwieldy campaign. (Khalilzad was the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration, making his hosting Trump — who reiterated, albeit not explicitly, his proposal for banning Muslim entry to the US in his speech today — strange to say the least.)
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That Trump would choose the Center for the National Interest as the place to premier his new seriousness on foreign policy has Manafort’s fingerprints all over it. For Manafort and the Center have something very important in common: both have ties to the Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin, (whose ambassador to the United States sat in the front row for Trump’s address).
For years, Manafort worked as a consultant to ex-Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, building what his own friends characterized as a “political love connection” with the pro-Russian leader. It was Yanukovych’s last-minute refusal to sign a trade agreement with the European Union in 2013 that sparked the Maidan revolution that ultimately drove him from power after his security forces murdered some 100 protestors in downtown Kiev. Yanukovych fled to Russia, where he remains.
Manafort was paid handsomely to clean up Yanukovych’s negative image, much as he is currently trying to do with Trump. But as is often the case with Western PR men hired to put lipstick on a pig, the pig is still a pig.
As for the Center, both it and its journal, the National Interest, are two of the most Kremlin-sympathetic institutions in the nation’s capital, even more so that the Carnegie Moscow Center, which has evolved from a hub of Russian liberalism into an accomodationist, intellectually-compromised think tank.
Center director Dmitri Simes worked as an aide to Nixon and for decades has used his connections to the Kremlin — real or perceived — to cultivate a reputation in Washington as one of the few Russia hands who intimately knows that country’s politics. For years, the Center for the National Interest partnered with the Russian government-funded Institute for Democracy and Cooperation, a New York-based institution whose head, Adranik Migranyan, was personally appointed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to a State Department cable released by Wikileaks. In May 2014, the two think tanks held a press conference defending Russia’s position in Ukraine.
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Lots more at
http://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trumps-russia-connections-foreign-policy-presidential-campaign/
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