A small bit of buzz over the past few days from this article in Newsweek by Jeffrey Garten, who makes the following suggestion:

Barack Obama’s first overseas trip should be to China, and it should occur within a month after his inauguration on January 20. He should bring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and his ambassador to Beijing. Such a trip would be a showstopper, breaking all precedents.

In bringing his seniormost entourage, the president would be doing what no American president has ever done with any country: demonstrating that he will be personally overseeing the relationship with another nation. He would be showing that the deepening of friendships now trump American preoccupation with problem countries, in large part because we need close allies to solve the big challenges.

My knee-jerk reaction to this was "Great idea!" And then I actually thought about this and changed my mind. This is well worth a post, for I would guess that a lot of other China expats and commentators will automatically think that anything that highlights the U.S.-China relationship is a good thing.

Let me be clear. I do not think that an Obama trip to China early on would be a bad thing. However, would it really be a "showstopper," as Garten states? Interesting perhaps, certainly newsworthy, and definitely a statement regarding Obama’s seriousness about China policy, but a "showstopper"? No way.

Look, everyone who isn’t brain dead understands the importance of the U.S.-China relationship in today’s world. A grand gesture on the part of the new president is simply not necessary. Obama will come here at some point, will devote a lot of attention to the relationship during his time in the White House, and everyone from D.C. to Beijing already knows all this.

The gesture of an Obama visit would no doubt please Beijing, which does think that grand gestures are important (cf. N. Sarkozy). However, I suspect that China’s government knows that they will be working closely with the Obama administration over the coming years and doesn’t actually require an upfront grand gesture to prove it.

To oversimplify, what Garten is telling us is that an Obama visit to China will somehow shock everyone, in a good way. "My goodness, he went to China, not the UK or Canada! Can you believe it? Wow!" The problem is that I can all too easily see it happening. It is somehow too logical and therefore fails the "wow" test.

Do I have a suggestion for a better trip for Obama as his first foray outside of the U.S. as president? Not specifically, but instead of going somewhere to emphasize a bilateral relationship, I would really like to see Obama go somewhere to highlight a policy issue. How about going to the Hague to talk about international law? Perhaps going to a poor country, maybe in Africa, to talk about poverty, health issues, and AIDS? (A poor country that had some interesting clean energy projects would be two for the price of one.) Maybe Obama could go to Cuba and close down Gitmo personally?

Those are showstoppers. A China visit would be boring in comparison.