Command in Chaos: Sarah Paine’s Grand Strategic Lessons from Zheng He to Trump

To study leadership without studying history is to sail blind into the storm. That is the fundamental lesson embedded in the teachings of Professor Sarah C. M. Paine. At the U.S. Naval War College, where the future commanders of American power come to refine their sense of judgment, Paine does not instruct her students in the empty cadences of fashionable theory. Instead, she returns them to the bitter, salt-ridden reality of empire, war, and strategic command. Her argument is blunt, elegant, and hard-earned: war and peace are not opposites, but modes of political behavior. Leadership is not an act of charisma, but of continuity. And the ocean – turbulent, lawless, unyielding – is the perfect metaphor for power. The leader, like the admiral, cannot afford illusions. He must command amidst chaos or be drowned by it.

Paine’s great theme is strategic coherence. The statesman, the general, and the CEO must all learn to align their ends, ways, and means. Most fail. Some flail. A few, however, succeed – not because they are born geniuses, but because they learn, adapt, and outlast. Through her sweeping studies of Asian and naval history – from The Wars for Asia, 1911 – 1949 to her analyses of maritime strategy – Paine offers a quiet but devastating critique of modern leadership. She exposes the false dichotomy between hard power and soft influence. She shows that command is not only about issuing orders, but about building systems capable of surviving the commander himself…