Success Quote by Mitchell Reiss

The line does a very diplomat’s trick: it lowers the temperature while raising the stakes. Reiss opens with “First of all,” a procedural throat-clear that signals he’s about to reorder the conversation, not just join it. He grants “problems” and even “failures” up front, inoculating himself against accusations of naïveté or whitewashing. That concession isn’t humility so much as positioning: once you’ve admitted the obvious negatives, you earn license to deliver the harder message people don’t want to hear.

The hard message is embedded in the comparative rhythm: “much more successful, much more resilient.” It’s less a compliment than a recalibration of expectations. The subtext is aimed at audiences who predicted imminent collapse - policymakers, pundits, perhaps even dissidents whose hopes were tethered to a fast failure. “Than people had anticipated” subtly shifts responsibility from the regime’s virtues to everyone else’s misread. The regime didn’t magically improve; the observers underestimated the tools of survival: coercion, patronage, institutional muscle, external backing, and the opposition’s fragmentation.

Contextually, this is the language of strategic realism. Diplomats speak in survivability metrics because policy follows forecasts: if a regime is sturdier than assumed, “wait it out” stops being a plan and starts being a fantasy. Reiss isn’t praising endurance; he’s warning that outcomes will be slower, uglier, and less morally satisfying than the story audiences prefer. The sentence pushes listeners toward a sober pivot: deal with the world as it is, not as our predictions promised it would become.