Recommendations for a Biden-Harris peace policy

Benjamin Friedman and Stephen Wertheim gives some foreign policy suggestions to the incoming Biden-Harris Administration in Say No, Joe: On U.S. foreign policy, there’s no going back to the status quo. Foreign Policy 11/25/2020.

He also appeared on The Majority Report on 12/02/2020 talking about the same topic, Why Biden Can't Go Back to the Foreign Policy Status-Quo w/ Stephen Wertheim - MR Live - 12/2/20, starting just after 18:00:

In the article, he and Friedman make the broad topical points, here quoted as a bullet-point list:

First, the Biden administration should not pursue global military dominance.

Second, the Biden administration must deliver on its promise to end what are often referred to as the United States’ “forever wars.”

Third, the U.S. military cannot police the Middle East, and Biden should not ask it to try.

Fourth, Biden must resist NATO expansion.

Finally, the next administration must temper U.S. militarism toward China.

0Changing NATO is not easy. The end of the Soviet Union would have been an appropriate time to redefine that alliance and made a more serious effort to establish a more stable relationship with Russia. The expansion of NATO eastward was bound to provoke Russian reactions like those we have seen in Georgia and Ukraine. But that's now the proverbial water under the bridge.

Here is Friedman and Wertheim write on NATO policy:

For all his rebukes of European allies, Trump only increased U.S. security commitments to the continent. On his watch, the United States sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, intensified revolving military deployments in the Baltic States, and welcomed Montenegro and North Macedonia into NATO. That trend needs to stop, not least because the accession of the next candidates in line for NATO—Ukraine and Georgia—could provoke a dangerous response from Russia. The Biden administration should welcome initiatives from France and other European states to assume the primary responsibility for dealing with security challenges in their own region. By doing so, the United States would not only cut down on costs but also diminish the risk of being pulled into a World War III. [my emphasis]

There have been indications recently, including Russia's tilt toward Azerbaijan in this year's military conflict with Armenia, that Putin's government is shifting to a more cautious and defensive foreign policy phase. It would certainly be worth a serious attempt to come to some relationship with Russia in which they allow their ethnic enclaves in Georgia and Ukraine to revert to those countries and returns Crimea to Ukraine. Some more-or-less explicit

Even that would be a very difficult diplomatic project. But it's worth a real effort.

It's also worth repeating the sentence of the last quote: "For all his rebukes of European allies, Trump only increased U.S. security commitments to the [European] continent."

Whatever else Trump's America First policy may have been, a more restrained posture in European affairs it was not. Particularly when it comes to expanding risks of involvement in military conflicts.