Sergei Magnitsky was a thirty-seven year old Russian lawyer and auditor who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a firm founded in 1996 by Bill Browder, the grandson of the famous leader of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder (1891-1973). Hermitage made tens of millions of dollars in the rush to buy up and sell state assets in the chaotic economic circumstances of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Browder’s efforts in the early 2000s to use the emerging Russian legal system to protect his investments and encourage large companies to operate transparently led him to cross swords with the financial and business elite of Putin’s Russia.

With Yugoslavia’s successor states simmeringwith conflict and discontent,problems of security,governance, and identity could boil over.

Here’s how Donald Trump can reassure our alliesthatthe United States won’t abandon its friends.

The new administration will inherit a Middle East foreign policy in tatters. The aspirations of President Obama’s Cairo speech of 2009 have not been met. Instead, failed states proliferate, non-state actors amplify disorder, and the stable rulers that remain rely on shaky legitimacy. The paradigm of a system of nation states may be disappearing before our eyes.

In the month of April, I found myself saying “I agree with Trump” more than anytime ever. On China, Russia, NATO and Syria, President Trump signaled radical changes in policy, nearly the complete opposite of what he said as a candidate. All were changes for the good — that is, new policy positions that advance American security, prosperity and values. The lingering question is whether these recent statements signal a fundamental change in Trump’s thinking about foreign policy or rather short-term reversals that could be reversed again. Is he learning or ad-libbing? It’s too early to tell.

After the vote results came in last November, many Russians close to the Kremlin celebrated. “Our Trump” — or #TrumpNash, as they tweeted — had been elected president of the United States... Of course, many factors combined to produce Trump’s victory, but Putin’s intervention most certainly played a contributing role.

For reasons still mysterious to me, U.S. President Donald Trump continues to praise and defend Russian President Vladimir Putin. Just yesterday, in an interview with Bill O’Reilly on Fox, President Trump affirmed his respect for Putin. When O’Reilly challenged Trump by calling the Russian president a “killer,” Trump defended Putin, whom he has never met, by criticizing the United States: “We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?”

For decades, American presidents have used their inaugural addresses to celebrate the values of freedom. At his inauguration on Friday, President Donald Trump will take to the podium to declare his aims for his next four years in office. Will he have anything to say about the importance of freedom?