Mexico has its first woman president, with 61-year-old Claudia Sheinbaum — a protege of outgoing leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador — the projected winner of Sunday’s election in the nation by a large majority.

The contest was widely seen as a referendum on Mr. Lopez Obrador, a populist who expanded social programs but largely failed to reduce drug cartel violence in Mexico. Ms. Sheinbaum, a climate scientist and former Mexico City mayor, said the election successfully “demonstrated that Mexico is a democratic country with peaceful elections.”

The main opposition candidate, Xochitl Galvez, a tech entrepreneur and former senator, had promised to take a more aggressive approach toward organized crime. A recent Threat Status Influencers exclusive video interview with Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown explored the rise of Chinese organized crime activities in Mexico and the extent to which the Chinese government is exploiting them for leverage over Washington.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin worked to shore up U.S. alliances in the Indo-Pacific through a series of meetings over the weekend at Singapore’s Shangri-La Forum, the region’s leading annual defense symposium. “Despite these historic clashes in Europe and the Middle East, the Indo-Pacific has remained our priority theater of operations,” Mr. Austin told the forum. “Let me be clear: The United States can be secure only if Asia is secure.”

Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon reports that Mr. Austin’s meetings came after Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell hosted his Japanese and South Korean counterparts in Virginia on Friday. The administration’s moves come amid concerns about the strength of U.S. commitment to the region, where China is adding military muscle while pursuing territorial disputes with India, Japan and the Philippines, and intimidating Taiwan — and where North Korea continues to defy U.N. Security Council resolutions with its nuclear weapons program.

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, headquartered in Hawaii, deploys 375,000 troops region-wide, but American armed services, with about 1.3 million service members overall, are facing recruitment difficulties. Mr. Salmon, who reported from Seoul, cites regional fears that U.S. forces, deployed worldwide, may lack traction across Asia. That concern, he writes, has been reinforced by strife in Ukraine and Gaza, where the Pentagon is supplying allies with weaponry, and where both crises might escalate.

China’s largest shipyard is bigger than all U.S. shipyards combined and the general capacity of the Chinese maritime defense industrial base to build ships is 230 times the size that of the United States. Those are two primary points that Seth Jones, who heads the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, makes in the latest Threat Status Influencers exclusive video interview.

Mr. Jones warns that the Chinese “defense industrial base is on a wartime footing,” while the U.S. is still operating in a peacetime capacity and has only just started to make efforts to reduce reliance on Chinese-sourced materials. He argues the U.S. government should create a new body akin to the War Production Board established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942.

Mr. Jones covers a wide range of topics, including the Chinese military’s embrace of “cognitive warfare” against the United States and the expansion of Chinese influence globally.

“The Chinese are expanding power and influence in what we call revanchist state building, not just in the Indo-Pacific, but much broader,” he asserts. “They’ve got space-based platforms and a range of other military activity in Latin America, in Africa, in the Middle East and strong trading relationships with a number of other countries … attempting to push out U.S. influence in multiple regions.”

Houthi rebels in Yemen fired anti-ship ballistic missiles at the USS Gravely, an American Navy destroyer, in the Red Sea over the weekend and vowed further attacks, as clashes between the Iran-backed group and U.S. forces appear to be expanding.

U.S. and British airstrikes targeted underground Houthi facilities, missile launchers and command and control sites in Yemen on Friday. An attempted Houthi attack on the USS Gravely late Saturday was likely retaliation for those strikes. Hours before the Houthis launched their ballistic missiles, a top Houthi official warned on social media that “the American-British aggression will not prevent us from continuing our military operations in support of Palestine, and we will meet escalation with escalation.”

The Houthis have said their months-long campaign to disrupt commercial maritime traffic in and around the Red Sea is designed to punish Israel, but many of the ships targeted seemingly have no connection at all to Israel. They have also repeatedly targeted American military ships.

After more than two years of war with Russia, an estimated 30% of Ukraine’s territory has been contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance. Ukraine, the “breadbasket of Europe,” is now raising a grim bumper crop of mines, shells and rockets, threatening one of the world’s great agriculture exporters and the livelihoods — and lives — of Ukrainian farmers.

Threat Status Special Correspondent Guillaume Ptak paints a stark picture in a dispatch from the agricultural village of Dovhenke in Kharkiv Oblast, where not a single building has been left unscathed and most houses have been reduced to piles of charred rubble and mangled steel. “Soviet-era 122cm GRAD rockets are everywhere, jutting out of people’s backyards or buried into the asphalt, as if the battle had only ended yesterday,” writes Mr. Ptak, who interviewed 44-year-old farmer Igor Knyazev for the dispatch.

A short energetic man with close-cropped hair and a dry sense of humor, Mr. Knyazev once ran with his father a thriving operation on the edge of the village, growing wheat, corn and a wide assortment of vegetables, from cucumbers to watermelons. But now his roughly 125 acres of land have been rendered mostly inarable by the shelling, while the visits of military de-miners have been few and far between. Although he’s back in his family home, the impact and aftershocks of the nearby war are on display daily.

• June 4 — Flashpoints and High Stakes: America’s Blueprint to Counter China, Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).

• June 4 — Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability, Wilson Center.

• June 4 — The Book Launch | “The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century,” Middle East Institute.

• June 4 — Supreme Allied Commanders on the Past, Present, and Future of NATO, Hudson Institute.

• June 5 — The Crisis in Georgia and Its Implications for the Black Sea Region, Hudson Institute.

• June 6 — Mexico’s Elections: Outcomes and Implications, Wilson Center.

• June 7 — Taiwan’s central role in the global economy, The Brookings Institution.