Josef Joffe, on leave as the editor of Die Zeit, the German weekly, is a senior fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.

The Peace Prize for Barack Obama is Europe’s revenge on George W. Bush. This is the best explanation for a decision that makes little sense otherwise. Just look at the calendar. Closing day for nominations was Feb. 1, when Mr. Obama had been in office for less than two weeks. Not a lot of time for saving world peace.

The prize was surely more anti-Bush than pro-Obama. Or if you want to add another dialectical twist: It was a prize by which the good folks of Europe, as represented by Norway, rewarded themselves for having transcended Mr. Bush’s Yahoo America — this retrograde warrior culture, this arrogant colossus trampling around the world in a self-granted mission to remake it in America’s image.

Mr. Obama, by contrast, is vaguely “un-American”: soft of language, soft of power, an American social democrat out to make his country more “European” — always ready to reach out to those who do not reach out to the West, nor wish it well. This is how the Europeans, once a race of conquerors and colonizers, like to see themselves: peaceable, cooperative, high-minded — that is, in a more advanced stage of development than Bushist America.

Without this subliminal urge to certify one’s own moral superiority, the prize for Mr. Obama does not make much sense. In the olden days, achievement was at least part of praiseworthiness. Norman Borlaug (1970), without much exaggeration, saved the third world with his “green revolution.” Willy Brandt (1971) had worked to make Europe whole again with his Ostpolitik. Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat (1978) had just concluded a peace that has held miraculously through two intifadas as well as two wars in Lebanon and one in Gaza.

Mikhail Gorbachev (1990) ended the cold war. Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (1973) could at least pretend that they had made peace in Vietnam, though the latter, knowing that this was to be a peace of conquest, didn’t accept the prize.

The awarding of the prize to Mr. Obama, however, honors a stance — the politics of goodness enveloped in uplifting oratory. It is the moral equivalent of “fly now, pay later” and a posthumous kick for George W. Bush and his coterie. Mr. Obama is now fighting two wars, which is not exactly a show of peaceability.

What is the Norwegian Nobel Committee going to do if Iraq works out after all as a semi-democratic anchor of the Arab world living in peace with its neighbors? That would be quite a contribution to peace. Will the Nobel committee award the prize to Mr. Bush ex post facto?

The Nobel Norwegians are not known for such a fine sense of irony.