Taiwan's Dangers

Yesterday, the American Prospect ran an article dealing with the possibility of military confrontation over Taiwan, which included mention of Chinese thinking that sinking an American aircraft carrier would be enough to chase us off. As Matthew Yglesias puts it:

"A disturbingly high number of foreigners appear not to have learned the appropriate lessons from Vietnam, namely that even under the best (worst?) case scenario where an apparently hopeless situation involving a vague-to-nonexistent security threat eventually provokes sufficient war-weariness to lead to American withdrawal, the conflict still goes on for a very long time and involves us wreaking massive death and destruction on your population. Since the Chinese government seems to have a perennial bug up its ass regarding Japanese history textbooks, they might want to peruse some of the literature dealing with the Imperial military's thinking about the likely consequences of Pearl Harbor which seemed to involve a similar miscalculation."

This is not a game of chicken I want to get into.