06 February 2025

NBC News | Defense Department drafting plans to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria after recent Trump comments
The Defense Department is developing plans to withdraw all U.S. troops from Syria, two U.S. defense officials told NBC News on Tuesday.

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Washington Post | U.S. won’t pay to rebuild Gaza or send troops, White House says

The Trump administration does not intend to pay for the reconstruction of Gaza, nor has it made any commitment to send U.S. troops there, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Wednesday, offering clarifying details a day after President Donald Trump vowed to take over the territory and rebuild it.

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Reuters | Exclusive: Ukraine sees marked improvement in accuracy of Russia's North Korean missiles

North Korean ballistic missiles fired at Ukraine by Russian forces since late December have been far more precise than salvos of the weapons launched over the past year, two senior Ukrainian sources told Reuters.

Military Times | VA will end remote work status for thousands of staffers this month
Veterans Affairs officials will require thousands of department staffers to return to in-office work by the end of February, part of a government-wide effort to eliminate remote duty assignments launched during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Task & Purpose | The new secretary of Veterans Affairs is an Air Force chaplain and Iraq War veteran
Doug Collins was confirmed on Tuesday as the next secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. He served in the Navy in the 1990s before joining the Air Force after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

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Military.com | Zelensky Says 45,100 Ukrainian Troops Killed in War, Open to Talks

Ukraine has lost 45,100 soldiers on the battlefield since Russia's all-out invasion began nearly three years ago, President Volodymyr Zelensky has said. In an interview with British journalist Piers Morgan published on YouTube late on Tuesday, Zelensky put the number of injured soldiers at 390,000.

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The American Conservative | Trump Restores “Maximum Pressure” on Iran
President Donald Trump on Tuesday reimposed a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran. The move brings back the tough-on-Tehran policy that Trump enacted in his first term.

Foreign Affairs | “America First” vs. Primacy | Reid Smith & Mitch McConnell
In his recent essay, “The Price of American Retreat” (January/February 2025), Senator Mitch McConnell lamented the failures of the Biden administration’s foreign policy and warned that “the response to four years of weakness must not be four years of isolation.” McConnell fears that an American “retreat” would embolden adversaries to advance while forcing allies to cower. His remedy: restore industrial capacity to sustain U.S. military predominance indefinitely. But after two decades of fruitless wars that drained American resources and destabilized vital regions, political leadership requires prioritizing core national interests, not endlessly underwriting the security of dependents. A better strategy would shift burdens to capable allies and prioritize Washington’s fiscal solvency.

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Foreign Policy | Why Trump Can’t Ignore Syria | Steven Simon
Despite the president’s desire to pull back from the Middle East, dealing with Damascus could be his first big strategic test.

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Responsible Statecraft | What Rubio said about multipolarity should get more attention | Trita Parsi
I almost fell off my chair listening to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent interview with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly where he declared unipolarity an anomaly and treated a return to multipolarity essentially as a correction by the gravitational forces of geopolitics.

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This is what he said:

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“So it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power. That was not — that was an anomaly. It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet. We face that now with China and to some extent Russia, and then you have rogue states like Iran and North Korea you have to deal with.”

The Veterans’ ACCESS Act was introduced in the new Congress last week by Rep. Bost and Sen. Moran – a bill that would protect veterans’ health care choices from bureaucratic meddling and hold the VA accountable for improving veterans’ awareness of and access to their preferred treatment choices – even when that treatment is not at a VA facility.

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Read CVA’s full statement here and watch CVA’s Chris Enget on OAN’s Tipping Point earlier this week discussing the dire need for Veterans’ ACCESS Act. Watch the interview here.