“The National Interest” has moved to Moscow
Late last night, I turned on the television for the best talk shows that begin close to midnight. For the second day running I found that Dmitry Simes is now the anchor or master of ceremonies for “The Great Game,” a very serious discussion program that was long run on this end by Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Molotov.
Nikonov is a leading figure in the Kremlin establishment. For many years he served as a member of the ruling United Russia party in the Duma and is now a committee chairman in the Federation Council, the upper house. Nikonov also was the long-serving director of ‘Russky Mir’ (Russian World), the government subsidized NGO promoting Russian culture among the worldwide diaspora. This post gave him wide visibility outside the legislative branch.
I met Nikonov in Moscow back in 2016. I saw him again in Brussels in 2017 when he was the leading guests at the annual Russian Forum held in the European Parliament building which his NGO helped to finance.These personal encounters strengthened my conviction that he is a diplomatic, suave and intellectually forceful politician, who had every talent needed to host one of the nation’s best on air discussion clubs.
From its creation ‘The Great Game’ was produced in ‘television bridge’ format, with a counterpart anchor in Washington. That man was Dmitry Simes, who well matched Nikonov in his insider’s knowledge of his adopted country, the USA.
Simes was a foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon who traveled with him on his Russian trips after he left the presidency. Following Nixon's death, Simes ran The Nixon Center think tank, which later changed its name to the less controversial and more patriotic sounding Center for the National Interest. In this capacity, Simes was also publisher of the homonymous magazine.
There were rumors a couple of years ago that Simes was having trouble in Washington. He was said to be a cameleon, a fellow who spoke out of both sides of his mouth, saying one thing to the Russians and another to his American colleagues. This duplicity had caught up with him.
Whatever the reason, Simes left his position at the helm of The National Interest, Center and magazine, in 2022.
From what I saw these past two days, Simes’ identity conflict is over. He jumped ship and is fully installed in Moscow. This was evident beyond a shadow of doubt from the way he conducted his discussion with two of his interviewees. I caught the tail end of his talk with Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov.
Ryabkov is the no-nonsense guy who was talking tough about the United States back in the late fall of 2021, before the Ukraine war. He was driving hard for negotiations over the Russian plan to reform the European security architecture by pushing NATO back to its pre-1997 borders. Ryabkov was as hard and direct as Lavrov is soft and, shall we say, mealy mouthed.
And here I saw Simes end his chat with Ryabkov on what you might call collegial terms. Great friends, to all appearances!
Then his next guest was Konstantin Kosachev, with whom he seemed also to have established a special rapport. Kosachev served in the State Duma then moved to the upper house, where he assumed direction of the Committee on Foreign Relations. He is now a Deputy Chairman of the Federation Council and a person well qualified to talk about the fraught present relationship with the United States, which was characterized on this program as being “an opponent or the enemy.”
I followed Kosachev’s career from a distance but then met him at the reception in downtown Moscow for the 10th anniversary of the creation of RT back in 2015. At that time he sounded somewhat naïve and hopeful relations with the USA would be restored. No one would call him naïve today. His little speech to Simes last night left no doubt that he understands all too well the danger Washington poses for Russia’s continued existence as a great power. His key message to Simes and to the television audience is that present times are even more dangerous than back in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, because American elites have hoodwinked themselves into thinking that nuclear weapons no longer count in measuring strategic strength of nations, in thinking that they cannot be used. This illusion of invulnerability has been compounded by America’s impunity and failure to be called to account for its wars of aggression over the past 30 years. In Serbia, in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, in Afghanistan. However, beware, said Kosachev: a nuclear superpower like Russia cannot suffer a strategic defeat such as the deluded American elites intend to impose on it; a nuclear superpower will in fact use all weapons at its disposal, including strategic nuclear arms, if it has reason to believe it is facing a military disaster.
For this message, which surely was directed more to listeners in the American intelligence community than for the Russian home audience, we can thank Mr. Dmitry Simes, Russian patriot that he has become.
Times are a changing...
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023