The United States today sits upon a precipice and the dream of the Founding Fathers of a new age of reason for all humankind may soon be washed away by the sands of time as just another failed effort to bring humanity into alignment with the force of natural law.

Time and again, humanity has been brought closer to this dream of an age of moral reason and cooperation that would define the terms of international law, political-economy, the arts, and even science policy. The topic was treated at length in Plato’s Republic, Laws, and Gorgias, just as it was treated by the great Platonist of the Roman Republic Cicero in his Commonwealth and Laws. It was treated thoroughly by the Platonic Christian St. Augustine of Hippo in his City of God and Free Choice of the Will, and it was treated by Augustine’s followers Alcuin (advisor to Charlemagne), Dante Alighieri, Nicholas of Cusa, and countless great Renaissance scholars and statesmen.

The idea of a society founded upon the cultivation of the love of higher pleasures of the spirit rather than the feeding of the lower pleasures of the fleshly passions is thus a long-standing one that has never been properly resolved and that has been sabotaged relentlessly by historic forces seeking to keep humanity enslaved to beliefs in sense perceptions such as serfs chained to a cave wall believing that those shadows cast before their eyes were all the reality that exists.

It is our contention that without an appreciation for this dynamic interplay between sets of paradigms as a driving force in global grand strategy, then it were impossible to achieve any truthful understanding of what made such anomalies of history as the 15th-century Italian Renaissance, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, or the 1776 American Revolution possible.

This volume will showcase the international grand design led by Benjamin Franklin that manifested in the establishment of the American republic and trace the next 130 years of world history as the USA was targeted for destruction by oligarchical forces from London and also from within leading up to the assassination of William McKinley in 1901.