José R. Cárdenas has spent nearly forty years at the center of Washington’s work in the Americas, at the State Department, the National Security Council, USAID, the Organization of American States, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A first-generation Colombian-American, he grew up in 1960s Northern Virginia, where his father stayed after a medical residency at Georgetown and a close Cuban-American community shaped his world. He came of age at Catholic University and Georgetown during the Reagan years, reading history as told by opposing camps, a habit that drew him to foreign affairs. His career began at the Cuban American National Foundation under Jorge Mas Canosa and led to USAID, where he served as Acting Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean. Today he makes the case that the hemisphere stands at a strategic moment, bound by shared values, shared history, and supply chains worth keeping close. His advice to young people is refreshingly simple: treat everyone with decency, always.