I think you're conflating different contexts and scenarios. People aren't used to war being brought to the US itself. Look at Pearl Harbor and 9/11, both rallying the country pretty well. Attacking the US mainland is a losing strategy.

If people generally understand that we're intervening in a China/Taiwan conflict for the right reasons, and China attacks us at home it would only accelerate the west. If you look at Vietnam, the logic around that war fell apart and it no longer made sense to continue it. The people were right to push back. Iraq and Afghanistan went on for a long time without much fuss.

Some kind of conflict in South East Asia would likely largely be a naval and resource war, with many casualties being naval rather than mainland. Most losses on both sides will probably be drones, AI or not.

If it came down to attrition, it would maybe be AI machine attrition or drone/missile attrition which is in a way a resource war which the US could win even without TSMC, but from where we're standing today it would take more ramping up which is a process that has already started.

If OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc were attacked by China in a more critical way, it would have to be for some major short term advantage that is capitalized on immediately, because long-term it would be a losing strategy by itself. China has systems to disrupt as well, so if they let loose on cyber then the US has options too.

Either way, don't conflate general economic preference around an election for whether people would tolerate being unable to access Gmail or order from Amazon like they would all rush to riot in the streets. I think that misreads the situation.

Off topic, but the reason Vietnam played out the way it did was because of China's implicit guarantee that they'd intervene in force if American troops came anywhere close to their borders like during the Korean War.

Fresh off WW2, with a titanic arsenal and industrial base, America and all of its allies couldn't end the war on their terms after China intervened.

That's why the US only did search-and-destroy missions, targeting Vietcong cells in the south and bombing supply lines in Laos. Which didn't matter much.

Once the Americans left, the North marched down a proper army and wrapped it up.