I wondered the same a while ago, and it turns out you can, in fact to test this hypothesis I ended up implementing such a language myself. The resulting syntax can express every construct from modern C++, is fully LALR(1) (no ambiguities and no vexing parses), has fewer keywords and is in general shorter than the equivalent C++ code, and once you know the syntax it is (subjectively) easier to read too (no spiral rule for example). Plus of course it can fully interoperate with existing C++.

Have been waiting to make it open source until I have finished writing the user manual (aiming for the end of this year), if that's interesting to you I post updates about it on twitter at cigmalang.