Politics & Power Quote by Mitchell Reiss

“Multilateral fashion” is the kind of phrase diplomats use when they’re trying to make power look like process. Mitchell Reiss isn’t just describing a preference for teamwork; he’s signaling a strategy for legitimacy. When a president “set out the policy guidance” and insisted the next steps “had to” be multilateral, the hard edge is in that modal verb: this isn’t idealism, it’s constraint management. Multilateralism here functions less as a moral commitment than as a political technology.

The key subtext sits in “so that other countries in the region could be invested in the success.” “Invested” is doing double duty. On the surface, it evokes buy-in and shared responsibility. Underneath, it implies leverage: if regional actors have skin in the game, they can be asked to pay costs, absorb backlash, provide cover, or enforce outcomes the U.S. doesn’t want to own alone. It’s burden-sharing dressed as partnership.

There’s also an implicit admission of limits. If the policy were straightforwardly enforceable by Washington, you wouldn’t need to recruit a chorus. Multilateral frameworks spread risk, dilute blame, and make it harder for spoilers to paint the process as foreign imposition. They also lock neighbors into a narrative of “success” where backing out becomes reputationally expensive.

Reiss’s language is intentionally bloodless because the stakes are not: “the region” is code for tangled histories, competing security agendas, and domestic politics on all sides. The sentence reads like a memo, but it’s really a map of how modern statecraft sells necessity as consensus.