When I saw the news that Christie was endorsing Romney, I thought that it wasn’t at all surprising. It makes sense that one relative moderate would endorse another, but I see that Alec MacGillis got there first. MacGillis repeats the question that I was asking back when Christie was the establishment’s idea of a superior candidate: “why were conservative financiers like [Paul] Singer so eager to have Christie in the race, when they already had a business-minded private-equity titan in Romney?” MacGillis offers some answers, including the familiarity these financiers had with the New Jersey governor, but I think the flocking of former and possible Christie backers to Romney’s camp and the personal endorsement of Christie show that there was never a good answer to this question. Had Christie’s boosters had their way, they would have made it that much harder for either Christie or Romney to prevail, and they would have been stuck with one of the candidates they probably can’t abide for one reason or another. It was a strange case of irrational exuberance if ever I saw one.

Christie’s endorsement of Romney may give us some idea of where he falls on the foreign policy spectrum. Christie spoke of “earned exceptionalism,” emphasized the priority of the national interest, and he called for being “more discriminating” in what the U.S. tries to accomplish overseas. All of this encouraged some people to see a foreign policy of restraint and prudence in Christie’s remarks that probably was never there. Christie’s remarks were generic enough that parts of his Reagan Library speech could be cited to support different interpretations, so we can’t know for certain what he meant. What we do know is that he’s endorsing Romney, which means that there was nothing Romney said in his alarmist speech last week with which he disagreed enough to turn him to another candidate, and it is probably not too much of a stretch to conclude that Christie agrees with the substance of the foreign policy Romney’s team outlined in their white paper. That suggests that conservative realists and non-interventionists aren’t missing anything by not having Christie in the race.