I recently listened to the audiobook version of Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders, which was originally released in 1996 and picks up directly where Debt of Honor leaves off. I enjoyed that novel, about a nationalist Japanese plot to cripple the US economy and seize US-controlled islands, as a period piece from its publication date of 1994.
Debt of Honor infamously ends with a distraught Japanese airline pilot flying his airliner into the US Capitol building, and the first section of Executive Orders amounts to a DC procedural about reconstituting the federal government, with Jack Ryan thrust into the presidency and trying to lead with honesty and common sense, unlike a career politician — which Clancy finds plausible.
Then the Iranians take out Iraq’s dictator — never named, but obviously Saddam — and form a United Islamic Republic out of the two countries — which Clancy finds plausible.
They then doom themselves by trying to weaken the US with a variety of underhanded attacks sure to invoke America’s wrath, including an attempt to kidnap Ryan’s youngest daughter from her daycare, an attempt to assassinate Ryan himself, and an attempt to surreptitiously start an Ebola epidemic across the US. Executive Orders came out just two years after The Hot Zone and popularized the airborne Ebola bioterror scenario.
As we should all now know, a virus with an infection fatality rate of 80 percent but an R0 of 2 (or so) is exactly the kind of pathogen you can shut down with a quick, draconian lockdown — which the no-nonsense President Ryan orders. The cost-benefit analysis is rather different for an IFR of one percent and an R0 of 3 or more.
The most classically “Clancy” element of the story is the manufactured clash between Chinese and Taiwanese planes over the Strait, where the Chinese goad the Taiwanese by crossing the (invisible) line and then escalating from “searching” to “tracking”:
The closure rate was still a thousand miles per hour, and both sides had their missile-targeting radars up and running, aimed at each other. That was internationally recognized as an unfriendly act, and one to be avoided for the simple reason that it was the aerial equivalent of aiming a rifle at someone’s head.
The Chinese escalate further, drawing a US carrier to the Strait, leaving the Indians free to maneuver their fleet, between passes of US satellites.
At the end of the novel, President Ryan announces a new foreign policy doctrine, the “Ryan Doctrine”, under which the United States will hold personally accountable any foreign leader who orders attacks on U.S. citizens, territory, or possessions in the future.