This conference attempted to address the following questions: How should a free society conduct itself in the context of a perilous world? What are the limits to which a thriving commercial society can extend control over events and conditions outside its borders? To what degree can a republic project power onto the world stage without harming its own institutions of representative government and the rule of law? All of these questions are urgently debated today, but they have been the perennial concerns of republics throughout the ages, and among the most important investigations remains Thucydides’s classic, The Peloponnesian War.