Leadership Quote by George J. Mitchell

Mitchell’s line works because it refuses the Middle East the dignity of its own exceptional despair. By dragging Northern Ireland into the frame, he’s making a strategic comparison: not “these conflicts are the same,” but “the feeling that nothing can change is a familiar stage, not a final verdict.” The key move is the mundane phrasing, “we stayed at it,” which lowers the temperature. No soaring rhetoric, no moral grandstanding - just the unglamorous discipline of negotiations that outlast headlines, elections, and spikes of violence. That understatement is the persuasion.

The subtext is aimed at two audiences at once. To outsiders, especially American and European policymakers, he’s warning against the chronic temptation to treat the Middle East as permanently intractable and therefore not worth sustained investment. To regional actors, he’s implying that pessimism is not evidence of realism; it’s often a political position, useful to hardliners and fatalists who benefit from proving talks futile.

Context matters: Mitchell didn’t just study peace processes; he helped engineer one, shepherding the Northern Ireland talks that culminated in the Good Friday Agreement. Invoking that experience is a quiet flex, but also a reminder of what the public forgets about peace: it’s repetitive, bureaucratic, and humiliating. “Stayed at it” signals a theory of change grounded in stamina. Not faith that the parties are suddenly enlightened - faith that persistence can alter incentives, exhaust spoilers, and create openings that only exist if you’re still in the room.