THE MORE THAT EUROPEANS TALK ABOUT MORALITY, writes Cornell professor Barry Strauss, the more likely it is that they’re really talking about power:

When it comes to the possibility of war in Iraq, for example, the main theme sounded in the European media these days is that Europe opposes American power. You know the refrain: unlike ignorant and arrogant Americans, Europeans know the true price of war. American intellectuals concur, but our mandarins have always been eager to embrace the argument that their countrymen are a bunch of spitball-throwing hayseeds while the Europeans recite Homer before breakfast.

So, let’s ask: What would Europe replace American power with — Kantian morality? Nope, the replacement would be European power. American unilateralism is what Europe fears most; the rights and wrong of war with Iraq are a secondary issue. “No to War, Yes to A European Voice,” is the way that one poster in Rome recently summed things up.

Indeed.