He is a nephew of my sister’s by marriage.  He has worked for decades for the CIA.  I presume he is still there.  I have not seen him since he was a toddler.  And that was 45 years ago, at least.  I would not know the Nephew if he walked in the door.  Nor do I know his politics.

Neither do I know what the Nephew does for the agency.  I do not want to know.  All I know is the agency posted him to places where we have vital interests and are known to have defended them.

I presume he has put his life at risk.  I wish I could call him and ask what he thinks of Donald Trump dissing the CIA’s conclusion that Russia directly interfered with the Nov. 8 elections.  History will record that Russia caused the best qualified candidate in a long time to lose and the worst qualified candidate ever to win.  Sen. John McCain is right: Russian involvement is a form of warfare.

I bet it rankles the Nephew that Trump is not taking full advantage of the briefings he should be receiving, information for which members of the CIA are risking their lives — today — while Trump meets with Kanye West.

I am so proud, yet worried when I think about it, that the Nephew knows more about world affairs and our national security than the president-elect of the United States.  The Nephew is one of too few Hispanic/Latinos* in the actual game.  Hispanic/Latinos lag in engagement and presence across the entire foreign policy and intelligence establishment.  No Hispanic/Latino diplomat in the nation’s history has excelled at the highest level in the handling of American foreign policy.

Development and management of foreign policy is the area of government in which Hispanic/Latinos might be the most underrepresented.  Some have used theatrics to project themselves as foreign policy experts but few people take them seriously. Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, George Marshall they are not.

The short- and long-term implications are serious.  In the short-term, if had we an experienced corps of Hispanic/Latino diplomats, active and retired, they might help mitigate how NAFTA is going to be recast by the least-knowledgeable chief executive in our lifetimes, how immigration policy might be managed and how the impact of the plutocrats Trump is appointing to government might be ameliorated .  In the long run, we will not have enough foreign policy experts to help change, reform or reorient current U.S. foreign policy in the years ahead if — and most likely when — Trump comes up a cropper.

Trump in dealing with Russia, China and Israel already has shaken up the country’s foreign policy arrangements of long standing.  By empowering Russia, basically recognizing Taiwan and perhaps now moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, Trump is going to leave the world a vastly more complicated place for many, many years.  This could mean the beginning of a Thirty Years War on top of the almost Twenty Years War we have fought since September 11, 2001.

And who shall pay the mounting bills?  Hispanic/Latinos?  The very group whose economic and social progress almost surely will be laid waste by a Trump administration and Republican governors and Republican-controlled legislatures across the nation?  The very group that is growing and on whom the nation should depend as the white, non-Hispanic/Latino population declines in share and number?

In the span of four hours on the evening of Nov. 8, our future overnight became evermore dangerous, evermore costly and evermore painful.  No scenario is out of bounds over the next four years.

I do not know at what age the Nephew signed up for duty to serve his country.  I doubt his colleagues and he signed up for their years of dangerous, perilous work to be devalued.  But I hope they keep working and not wander off into much-deserved retirement – not yet.

If he survives the mess Trump seems on the precipice of creating, perhaps the Nephew will be at the right age, time and place to manage the aftermath.

If he were, that probably would be good.

Jesús (Jesse) Treviño is the former editorial page editor of The Austin American-Statesman.

*Hispanic/Latinos is not a typo. It is a run-in to overcome the rhetorical divide between Hispanics who are not Latinos and Latinos who are not Hispanic.