Christie made some silly claims about foreign policy recently:

“I think that foreign policy is all about, at first blush, the personality of the people executing that foreign policy,” he said. “Kissinger said to me one time, ‘Foreign policy is all about courage and character. Everything else can be learned.’”

The idea that foreign policy is “all about” a politician’s personality at any point is risible, but it’s what we have come to expect to hear from candidates that don’t know very much about the policy issues. Christie has argued in the past that he would be able to deter Putin from taking aggressive actions simply because of “who he is.” He is stuck saying ridiculous things like this because he still doesn’t know very much. Christie has absolutely no foreign policy experience, and so he has to dismiss it as irrelevant. A candidate’s temperament and judgment are important, but they certainly aren’t everything.

The second claim is also wrong, and there’s a story behind that quote that we should remember. We should bear in mind that Kissinger was actively trying to get Christie to jump into the 2012 race when he supposedly said this to him:

As the former New Jersey governor later told The Washington Post’s Dan Balz for his book “Collision 2012,” Kissinger summoned him to his midtown Manhattan office in mid-2011 and urged him to run for president, saying he had a rare connection with voters. When Christie replied that he knew little about world affairs, his host told him not to worry. “We can work with you on that. Foreign policy is instinct, it’s character,” Christie recalled Kissinger saying.

The reason that he said this to Christie was that Christie knew nothing about foreign policy, and more to the point Christie knew at the time that he was unprepared to run for president. It probably flatters foreign policy advisers to think that they can quickly train up politicians that know very little, but it doesn’t seem to happen very often. As far as I can tell, Christie hasn’t learned that much about foreign policy in the intervening four years, and perhaps that’s because he had been reassured that “instinct” and “character” were all that really mattered.

We hear all the time from boosters of this or that inexperienced politician that what really matters on foreign policy is a presidential candidate’s “instincts.” When a candidate clearly isn’t well-versed on international issues, we are told that all of that can be learned at some later date, and yet the promised learning never seems to happen. One reason that it never happens is that there usually isn’t enough time for a candidate in the middle of a campaign to pick up on things that it has taken others years to understand. Another is that a candidate who knows little about the subject at this point in their political careers probably doesn’t care very much about it. Finally, there’s no substitute for paying close attention to these issues over a long period of time. That isn’t something that can be absorbed in just a few months of briefings, and it can’t be obtained by having the right “instincts.” Any candidate that claims otherwise is just trying to distract voters from his foreign policy ignorance.