Treasury’s War is an unusual book. Given the way it reads, its subtitle might well have been “A Bureaucratic Adventure Story.” Don’t roll your eyes—the genre really does exist. Government whistleblowers often put into books the story of what they did to foil policymakers (most always unsuccessfully). Most of these bureaucratic romances are about bad policies and the failure to avoid them despite the author’s sage advice. Treasury’s War is very different. Juan C. Zarate describes a bureaucratic success. That is to say, his is a tale of how bureaucrats did something new and useful by defeating the usual inertia and…

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