Daily Inspiration Quote by Mitchell Reiss

“First of all” is the tell: a verbal hand on the brake, buying time and seizing control of the frame before anyone can pin him to a historical script. Mitchell Reiss, speaking as a diplomat, isn’t offering a history lesson. He’s issuing a preemptive rebuttal to the most common move in foreign-policy debate: the analogy. If you can force today’s crisis into the mold of ’93 or ’94, you don’t have to wrestle with its messy specifics; you just recycle conclusions. Reiss is trying to deny that shortcut.

The line is doing three things at once. It acknowledges that the comparison is in the room (someone has already invoked 1993-94 as warning or precedent), it concedes enough to appear reasonable (“I think”), and then it reasserts authority by redefining the terrain (“different place”). That phrase is classic diplomatic elasticity: “place” can mean strategic balance, public appetite for intervention, legal constraints, institutional capacity, or intelligence clarity. By keeping it unspecific, he can invite allies to project their preferred rationale onto it while still sounding decisive.

The subtext is less about time than accountability. If today is “different,” then past failures or hesitations cannot be used as a cudgel against current policy; likewise, past successes can’t be demanded as templates. It’s a small rhetorical maneuver with big consequences: it widens the policy menu, lowers the burden of historical consistency, and signals that the speaker wants to be judged on present conditions, not on the ghosts of the early post-Cold War moment.