Mitch Ilbury reviews James Romm's Plato and the Tyrant to explore a discomforting question for our moment: how can liberal democratic systems produce leaders so apparently at odds with their own values? Drawing on Plato's ill-fated attempts to reshape the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, Ilbury examines the razor-thin line separating Plato's ideal city from its tyrannical mirror image — a distinction resting not on structures but on the character of whoever holds power. He traces Platonic themes through contemporary politics, from Australia's social media ban to Trump's flattery-seeking court, arguing that tyranny is not an alien intrusion into healthy democracies but a latent possibility within them, one that surfaces whenever faith in the existing order begins to falter.

Maria Golubeva explores how wargaming can better capture the diversity and ambiguity of hybrid threat actors — hostile states, ambiguous allies, and non-state groups such as hacktivists and criminal networks — at a time when the liberal international order is fracturing. She argues that existing frameworks err by assuming hybrid threats always pursue geostrategic objectives, when disruption itself is increasingly the goal. Golubeva examines how the information environment must be reconstructed in wargame scenarios to reflect real-world sense-making, strategic ambiguity, and strategic differentiation across multiple audiences. She proposes that credible hybrid threat wargames should assign ideological or non-geostrategic rationales to red teams, simulate differentiated information campaigns across platforms, and resist the temptation to reduce complex actor motivations to a single coherent strategy.

Professor Chiyuki Aoi, Paul Bacon, Shinae Lee, Corey Wallace, and Aurelio Insisa explore why diplomatic pledges between Europe and the IP4 democracies — Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand — have produced so little practical cooperation on countering foreign information manipulation. They find the gap stems not from lack of political will, but from misaligned institutions, uneven capabilities, and divergent threat perceptions across the four countries. The authors propose a phased, minilateral approach: building shared terminology and analysis first, then capacity building, and only later limited operational cooperation.