YMMV / Executive Orders

• Harsher in Hindsight: Like most of Clancy's works, the events in the book have eerie parallels with real-life events that happened a decade or so later.
  • The plot is motivated by a group of extremists from neighboring countries banding together to form an Islamic state in the wake of a power vacuum. Seen as the standard Clancy fare when it was written, but now takes on a disturbing tone with the rise of ISIS.
  • The usage of smart-bombs to eliminate Islamic extremists would foretell the eventual usage of drone attacks to accomplish the same thing.
  • One of the terrorists makes his way inside the White House and gets all the way to the Oval Office, exposing the government's security vulnerabilities. Nearly twenty years later, a runner hopped the White House gate and got inside one of the buildings just by running before being taken down.
  • One of the troubles Ryan has to put up with is members of the intelligence community leaking secrets to his political rivals to undermine his administration. Which is the same thing President Donald Trump ended up accusing the intel community of doing to him during his presidency.
  • Most notably, the entire Ebola threat which leads to a national shutdown is eerie in the wake of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.
• Nightmare Fuel: The effects of the Ebola virus on its unfortunate victims are very graphically shown, particularly with its first victims. Later, the UIR unleashes this horror on the American public, inflicting a Cruel and Unusual Death on thousands of innocent people.
• Paranoia Fuel: The UIR agents who start the Ebola epidemic do so by hiding small cans of aerosolized Ebola solution in convention centers across the United States. By the time people start dying, the attackers are safely back in the UIR, leaving barely any trail behind them.
• Strawman Has a Point: One of the criticisms Ed Kealty levels at Jack Ryan's administration is Ryan's appointment of old friends to positions of power within the federal government, i.e. Ed Foley as CIA director, George Winston as Secretary of the Treasury, and Dan Murray as FBI director. Now, from the reader's perspective, we know that Ryan is appointing them because they are highly competent, but from an outsider's position it does look a hell of a lot like nepotism, especially Murray's jump in rank over other, higher ranked assistant directors.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: The Secretaries of Interior and Commerce, the only other survivors of Durling’s cabinet. Early chapters make a few references to having them flown into D.C. to help stabilize things, but afterward they remain unnamed background figures. They have no interactions with Ryan and only get a single word of dialogue between them. Both were originally hired by Ryan’s enemy Bob Fowler, but they come across as somewhat reasonable during the meeting to discuss Ebola. It’s easy to feel that Clancy missed a trick by not having further scenes where they help and/or hinder Ryan in his presidency's early days.

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