Whether it’s Mr. Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris who wins on Nov. 5, the next president will face high-stakes decisions about America’s open-ended military engagements around the world that risk turning into a new wave of “forever wars” that suck up security and economic resources indefinitely.

Under President Biden and Ms. Harris, the U.S. in September announced that its anti-ISIS mission in Iraq would wind down over the next year, though the new approach is not expected to directly affect the American troop deployment in neighboring Syria.

Ongoing U.S. military campaigns focused on Somalia, Syria and Yemen have mostly been drowned out by the much more publicized Israel-Iran proxy war in the Middle East and the Russia-Ukraine war. Whoever wins on Tuesday will likely feel pressure to scale back, at some point, expensive U.S. counterterrorism campaigns in the Middle East and Africa.

It’s in line with the broader push by U.S. policymakers of both parties to dedicate more military assets to the Pacific, the world’s most dynamic economic region where an increasingly powerful and aggressive communist China poses what virtually all observers agree is the single greatest challenge to America and its allies in the 21st century.

At the end of the day, there isn’t that much daylight between Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris when it comes to where each would take U.S. policy toward communist China. That’s according to Andrew Payne, a lecturer in foreign policy and security at City St George’s, University of London, who is featured on the latest episode of the Threat Status Weekly Podcast that dropped Friday morning.

Apart from Mr. Trump’s proposal for a 60% tariff on all goods coming into the United States from China, Mr. Payne argues that the “$64,000 question” of how to manage China is not nearly as visible in the presidential campaigns as it should be. “I thought this was going to be a case of each candidate basically trying to out-hawk each other,” Mr. Payne tells Threat Status. “But actually, … beyond vague claims about, you know, winning the competition for the 21st century, whatever that means, it hasn’t been as prominent as I would have expected.

“The reason is because, actually, there’s not that much distance between the candidates,” he argues. “Both sides agree that China is the principal geopolitical threat going forward. And because voters are not paying attention to specific policy details, there’s no incentive for them to map those out beyond the kind of general, vague impression that China is bad. And I think that’s a problem, because … [the] candidates actually do owe it to voters to spell out in crystal-clear detail what they would do.”

Mr. Payne’s assessment dovetails with comments journalist and author Peter Bergen made in a recent interview with the Threat Status Influencers video series. Mr. Bergen credited Mr. Trump with inaugurating a new era of confrontational policy toward Beijing, but the Biden administration has also “basically continued” the Trump approach, keeping in place — and even adding to — tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on Chinese goods during his first term.

Plans to rapidly deploy an integrated missile and air defense system on Guam now call for placing interceptors and sensors at just 16 sites on the strategic Pacific island instead of the initially planned 35 locations, the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency said.

The MDA and military services disclosed the reduced number of defense sites in a draft environmental impact statement published Oct. 25 for the program called the “Enhanced Integrated Air and Missile Defense” (EIAMD) system.

The development comes despite a DIA report made public in mid-October that said China is expanding its force of DF-26 intermediate-range missiles, which Beijing has dubbed a “Guam killer” for their 2,500-mile range.

Guam is located 1,800 miles from the China coast and is a major U.S. military hub for warships, submarines, bombers and stocks of weapons that would be called on in any future defense of Taiwan or the Philippines, both of which face rising aggression from Beijing.

Seasoned regional experts are sounding the alarm about Western media outlets mischaracterizing the veracity of North Korean troops, reports Washington Times Asia Editor Andrew Salmon, who cites claims in the U.S. press that the nearly 10,000 soldiers Pyongyang has sent to bolster Russia’s war on Ukraine “appear relatively short and slightly built” and have “no experience whatsoever.”

Some say Ukraine and the West denigrate the quality of the North Korean soldiers at their peril. “It is absurd how they underestimate the North Koreans,” said Chun In-bum, a retired general who led the South Korean military’s Special Forces Command. “I think they will be a shock to the Western world.”

Grant Newsham, a retired U.S. Marine officer with decades of experience in the Indo-Pacific theater, said: “Asian troops can fight. You’d think people would have learned this by now. Korean War veterans understood this, as did American and British forces in World War II. Vietnam? Same thing. … This doesn’t mean they can’t be defeated — and badly — but it does mean they should not be underestimated.”

Retired CIA clandestine services officer and Threat Status opinion contributor Daniel N. Hoffman reminds us that “Revolutionary War philosopher and pamphleteer Thomas Paine once wrote that ‘the right to vote is the right upon which all other rights depend.’”

“Next Tuesday, when we elect the 47th president of the United States, is a celebration of our democratic process, the foundation of what makes our country a ‘shining city upon a hill,’” writes Mr. Hoffman, who reflects that over the course of his CIA career, there were seven presidential elections, four of which resulted in a transfer of power from one party to the other.

“Each time, I witnessed first-hand — sometimes at CIA headquarters and other times while stationed overseas — how the Intelligence community quietly helped to ensure the smooth transition from one administration to another,” Mr. Hoffman writes. “The president-elect will have a handpicked team of political appointees to advise on and execute critical policy decisions. But that team will rely on our exceptional national security professionals, who take an oath not to a person or a party but to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

• Nov. 1 — Countering Authoritarian Regimes’ New Tactics in Latin America, Hudson Institute

• Nov. 7 — First in War, First in Peace: Building Post-Conflict Stability and Democracy, U.S. Institute of Peace

• Nov. 8-10 — IISS Prague Defense Summit 2024, International Institute for Strategic Studies

• Nov. 22-24 — Halifax International Security Forum

• Dec. 7 — 2024 Reagan National Defense Forum, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Institute