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 protesters 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.