Equity PM Question (from CFAI text)

Hello fellow L3’ers. This may well be the first question on the reading…sorry! Maybe someone else has already covered this material or has good recall from years past? ************************* If a company pension plan hires a PM with long-short investment strategy to manage its U.S. EQUITY PORTFOLIO, wouldn’t it be a problem if a significant amount of the active returns generated by the strategy were from positions in NON-U.S. COMPANIES? Isn’t this diverging from the (U.S. equity) investment mandate? An important caveat to the question is to assume (1) that the long-short strategy is equitized with Russell 1000 futures and (2) Misfit Risk is small. So, is it the case that long-short strategies are not constrained by geographical investment profiles as long as, net-net, they stay market neutral and mirror their appropriate benchmark? The CFAI answer key says it’s not a concern as long as the PM “has skill in managing non-U.S. equities.” Needless to say, I’m not 100% getting this answer. CFAI question #11.E (Rdg 33, Vol 4, pg.257)