Sure enough, but his plots already went batshit crazy in the mid-'90s. Sure, Debt of Honor can be forgiven for seeming dumb in retrospect, because Clancy was far from the only one who bought into the "Japan is the next big superpower and a BIG THREAT" meme that floated around at the time. But Executive Orders is just batshit neocon wish-fulfillment with only the most tenuous links to reality.
With 2000's The Bear and the Dragon, Clancy just seems totally incoherent. Gone is the clear insight he once had into Cold War geopolitics back in the '80s. It really seems that he never understood the post-Cold War realities, and the set-ups for his books consequently become patently ridiculous.
From that point onward, he started "co-writing" (and later outsourcing), and the quality dipped further and further down. But Executive Orders was already self-indulgent, writing-wise, and The Bear and the Dragon is overly bloated and (it seems) barely edited. At least not edited by someone who could ever say "no" to Clancy...