Daily Inspiration Quote by Mitchell Reiss

There is a diplomat's sleight of hand baked into Reiss's phrasing: by conceding "in a sense", he offers a small nod to complexity, then uses it to cordon off the truly explosive part of the dispute. "Verification" is the word that usually signals substance - facts, compliance, the hard engineering of trust. Calling it "irrelevant" is a power move, one that reframes the argument away from whether something is true and toward how it is being presented, processed, or packaged.

That pivot to "format issue" is doing quiet but heavy work. Format sounds procedural, even boring: paper trails, sequencing, who signs what, the architecture of an agreement. In diplomatic fights, that is often where leverage lives. If you can define the problem as one of format, you can push it into committees, timelines, and technicalities, keeping the conversation inside a controlled environment where compromise is easier and blame is harder to assign.

The subtext is also a warning: insisting on verification may be a rhetorical decoy, a way for one side to look tough while stalling. Reiss implies that the real blockage isn't epistemic (what can be verified) but bureaucratic and political (what kind of instrument both parties can live with). It's the language of someone trying to de-dramatize a standoff, redirect negotiators toward the mechanics that actually determine outcomes, and, not incidentally, signal to observers that the adult conversation is happening offstage - in the formatting.