A direct sequel to The Sum of All Fears (1991), Jack Ryan becomes the National Security Advisor when a secret cabal of Japanese industrialists seize control of their country's government and wage war on the United States.

Japanese industrialist Raizo Yamata has been plotting to bring back his country to a position of greatness for years, partly as revenge for the death of his family at the hands of American forces invading the island of Saipan during World War II.

The incident leads to the swift passage of a law allowing the U.S. to mirror trade practices of the countries from which it imports goods, cutting off the American export markets upon which the Japanese economy depends.

An immediate retaliation is forestalled by the second phase of the Japanese offensive: an economic attack, where Japan engineers the collapse of the U.S. stock market by hiring a programmer who is a consultant for an exchange firm to insert a logic bomb into the system, which when triggered blocks the storage of all trade records made after noon on Friday.

The U.S. Air Force then proceeds to eliminate the rest of Japan's AWACS system through low-profile military attacks using widely dispersed U.S. assets, allowing B-2 bombers to destroy the hidden ICBM silos.

Outmaneuvered and cornered by the United States' military and economic response, Goto resigns, ceding power to his predecessor Koga, who was rescued earlier by Clark and Chavez from Yamata.

However, an embittered Japan Air Lines pilot, driven mad by the deaths of his son and brother during the conflict, flies his Boeing 747 directly into the U.S. Capitol during a special joint session of Congress.

However, Christopher Buckley, in a review for The New York Times, called the book a "herniating experience", criticized its "racist" depictions of Japanese characters and judged that it was "as subtle as a World War II anti-Japanese poster showing a mustachioed Tojo bayoneting Caucasian babies".

[4] In later years, the novel was noted for its similarity to the circumstances surrounding United Airlines Flight 93, especially regarding its climax, where an embittered Japanese pilot crashes his 747 on a joint session of Congress in the Capitol.

While researching for the novel's ending, Clancy consulted an Air Force officer and described his reaction: "I ran this idea past him and all of a sudden this guy's eyeballing me rather closely and I said, 'Come on General, I know you must have looked at this before, you've got to have a plan for it.'