Thread by @ChrisMurphyCT

THREAD: Yes @ABlinken and Biden’s national security team have loads of experience, but they are open to new ideas.

That’s key, bc U.S. foreign policy has become dangerously sclerotic, and progressives have offered several productive critiques of the national security consensus.

1/ For instance, it’s time for America to finally shake our hubris of what can be accomplished by military deployments in far off places. Restraint IS a policy. Often our intervention (think Iraq or Libya or Syria) ends up doing much more harm than good.

2/ Secret wars, exempt from public view or oversight, too often go off the rails. For example, our drone program more often kills the wrong target, adding fuel to extremist groups recruitment drives.

3/ Choose to fight Russia symmetrically. That means plussing up counter-propaganda, anti-corruption, and energy independence programming on Russia’s periphery. In general, we need more non-military tools in our foreign policy toolkit.

4/ Sanctions can have impact, but their overuse is risking making the tactic feckless. Too often the are just a box checking exercise. Or they hurt orindary people while not changing the behavior of foreign regimes. We need to be much more strategic in our sanctions use.

5/ No military action without congressional authorization. Yes, it’s hard to get sign off from Congress for a military strike. But for good reason. Americans are rightly skeptical about military action, and that’s why the Constitution vests the war making power in Congress.

6/ Progressives don’t hate trade deals - just trade deals that are written for corporations instead of workers and citizens. Let’s do a new Asia trade agreement, but one that is written to protect wages, not profits and shareholder returns.

7/ Foreign policy must = climate policy. But diplomacy alone can’t save the planet. We need hard dollars for America to spend abroad to help developing nations cover to clean energy. Billions for a supersized Green Climate Fund.

8/ Let’s stop blindly fueling a dangerous arms race in the Middle East. The equipment we send to UAE ends up w extremist militias. The bombs we send to Saudi end up killing kids in Yemen. And it all just leads to an Iranian arms buildup. Let’s be more judicious in arms sales.

9/ Restore America’s commitment to a two-state future in the Middle East. Take a hard line on new settlements and annexation. Restore funding for humanitarian programs in the PA. Being an ally of Israel’s security means charting a path to a Palestinian state.

These are just a few ideas that don’t always find a home inside the national security consensus.

But I’ve worked w many on Biden’s team and I know they are willing to work with progressives - and anyone else with new, good ideas - to make American foreign policy more nimble.