Who is Dimitri Simes and what is the CNI

Dimitri K. Simes (born Dmitry Kostantinovich Simis, Russian: Дмитрий Константинович Симис; October 29, 1947) is 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 (SAIS) 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.