The best GOP candidate is ... already in the White House!

One can easily imagine that the NATO bombing a Pakistani base and killing its soldiers will push the US-Pakistan relations to a new low. 

Keep that development in mind as you read the following sentences from an op-ed by India's former foreign minister:

South Asia is riddled with multiple antagonisms and mutual suspicions. India mistrusts Pakistan and vice versa. Afghanistan and Pakistan are at loggerheads. On the sidelines, China, Iran and Russia look to Afghanistan for opportunities to help themselves and crimp the United States. US officials, meanwhile, are preparing to retreat from a decade of war in the Afghan hills and valleys.
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On the surface, one would not think so. US-Pakistan relations have turned poisonous, with blunt statements proliferating from both governments. In Istanbul, a recent gathering of Afghanistan's concerned "neighbours" produced only a rather anodyne statement in preparation for a meeting in Bonn later this year.
When confronted by such a diplomatic snarl, there are, in reality, only two options: either allow the disputes to boil in their own cauldrons, or lower the temperature on all of the region's antagonisms before a cataclysmic explosion occurs. Clearly, today's frozen regional diplomacy must end; far too much of global importance is at stake.
India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US form a rectangle of relationships in South Asia, with India, China and the US constituting a triangle that not only contains the South Asia region, but is also a major theatre in an increasingly global struggle. The emerging geopolitical centrality of the Indian Ocean, through which an ever-increasing share of world trade passes, is a third, complicating, factor.
Untangling this web, and imparting to it a co-operative order, should be high on the agenda of all countries involved. Consider India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US. Can these relationships be transformed into anything resembling a co-operative effort?

Good luck on that.

On top of everything else, I wonder why President Obama felt compelled to move into China's sphere of influence, with his decision to locate a military base in Australia.  Really?  Come on!

I am all the more convinced that the best Republican candidate is already in the White House!  It is just that the Republicans have rushed so far to the right extreme that they don't realize that Obama is way to the right of where many Democrats hoped he would be.  No surprise that hawks, like Walter Russell Mead, are happy with all this:

Congratulations should go to President Obama and his national security team.  The State Department, the Department of Defense and the White House have clearly been working effectively together on an intensive and complex strategy.  They avoided leaks, they coordinated effectively with half a dozen countries, they deployed a range of instruments of power.  In the field of foreign policy, this was a coming of age of the Obama administration and it was conceived and executed about as flawlessly as these things ever can be.
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The US has won the first round, but the game has just begun.  The Obama administration and its successors will now have to deal with a long term contest against the world’s most populous country and the world’s most rapidly developing economy.  The Obama administration may not have fully counted the costs of the new Asian hard line; for one thing, it is hard to see significant cuts coming in defense spending after we have challenged China to a contest over the future of Asia.  It’s possible that less drama now might have made America’s point as effectively while reducing the chance of Chinese push back, but there is not a lot of point in debating that now.