So when he talks about why he is internationalist it's personal, when he talks about why he is a liberal it's personal, and when he talks about freedom and democracy it's personal.
Christie, whose limited public statements about foreign policy have drifted towards the internationalist end of the spectrum, said the GOP must be "for America being a leader in the world" backed by "a strong national defense, one that doesn't allow leaders to run over us all around the world".
He was an internationalist to his core, believed passionately that Britain should remain part of Europe.
Or love of the language and its literature (and, if so, is that devalued by a more internationalist attitude to art forms that don't bump up against the English incapacity to speak foreign languages)?
Switzerland's notably internationalist economy is more closely integrated with the EU than ours is.
The more internationalist among American strategists have long argued that a stronger Europe would be better able to help the United States sort out the world's crises.
Mr Rutelli's manifesto is more eagerly internationalist; it sounds warmer towards international bodies such as the UN, the OECD and even NATO.
And though the multilingual Mr Clegg is making the party yet more internationalist than it was, his disastrous decision to debate against Nigel Farage of the anti-EU UK Independence Party has shown the limits to this.
Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukAMERICA'S dominant Atlanticist idea, free trade and an Anglo-American internationalist outlook, emerged out of cold-war necessities, owing more to NATO than to Plato, as Bruce Cumings puts it.
A strong internationalist, he is unlikely to pull the troops out willingly, but pressure from within the army may force his hand.
"He needed to be more populist, she's going to be more internationalist," says Nicolás Ducoté of CIPPEC, a Buenos Aires think-tank.
