The United States is in a war. This war is not fought with missiles and bullets, but with dollars, yen, and deutsche marks. This is a war for dominance in the global marketplace, a war for economic supremacy.

The United States is losing this war. Year after year, tens of billions of dollars flow from American bank accounts to Japanese pockets - the stark meaning of the oft-cited "merchandise trade deficit" - half a trillion dollars worth in the last decade. The United States is not losing because the Japanese are devious, or mercenary, or "unfair traders." We are losing because of our own greed, myopia, and arrogance.

The Keys to the Kingdom, a masterful account of bureaucratic ineptitude, political bloodshed, high-level intrigue, and sometimes breathtaking stupidity, chronicles the first major battle in this war. Aerospace and aviation products are America's most lucrative exports, bringing in billions of dollars and providing millions of high-wage jobs.

The Japanese, having developed world-class auto, steel, and electronics industries (in the process devastating large segments of the American economy), make no secret of the fact that aviation and aerospace are their next targets. Despite these high stakes, the government of the United States, incredibly, agreed to give the Japanese some of the most sensitive, state-of-the-art aviation technology and design information America possesses - to build a plane called the FS-X.

How this astonishing event transpired is the subject of The Keys to the Kingdom. Here is a tale of people at the front lines of the United States-Japan rivalry: the Japanese engineer who dreamed of re-creating the glory of the fabled Zero; the hard-nosed career bureaucrat whose fierce opposition to the FS-X deal set off internecine warfare in the American government; the mysterious Japanese lobbyist who seemed to have connections everywhere.

Impeccably researched, brilliantly rendered, The Keys to the Kingdom boldly illuminates the themes that will dictate the fate of American power in the twenty-first century.