Politics & Power Quote by Peter Singer

Singer’s sentence lands like a moral ledger finally being balanced, and that’s the point: he’s less interested in relitigating the invasion’s immediate horrors than in spotlighting a slower, more politically inconvenient injury. “Reputation and prestige” sounds like diplomatic soft stuff until he frames it as “damage” with a delayed fuse. The occupation isn’t merely a policy mistake abroad; it’s an ethical and strategic corrosion that will eventually exact a domestic price.

The key move is temporal. “Much clearer” implies that denial was previously possible, even comfortable. Singer is puncturing the early-2000s American bubble in which power could substitute for legitimacy, and global outrage could be dismissed as noise. By emphasizing that this realization is “just starting now to hit home,” he’s diagnosing a familiar pattern: democratic publics often feel foreign policy consequences only when they rebound internally as higher costs, diminished influence, and a more suspicious world.

Subtextually, Singer is also challenging a national self-image. “Occupation” does rhetorical work; it reframes a mission sold as liberation into something historically tainted, inviting associations with empire, coercion, and humiliation. For a philosopher known for utilitarian clarity, this is a pragmatic warning dressed as moral critique: you can’t indefinitely separate what you do to others from what happens to you. The line turns “prestige” from vanity into a currency of persuasion America is burning through, making future cooperation harder and future force more isolating.