Geostrategic Trap as a Tool of Hybrid Wars in Conditions of a Depressive Super-Long War Cycle

Globalization, the information and digital technological revolution, the abolition of the bipolar confrontational international system based on the confrontation between the United States and the USSR, the phenomenon of “death of ideologies”, expressed in the decline of ordinary citizens’ interest in politics, consumerism as a new lifestyle now available to residents of the post-Soviet space, international payment systems, increased international mobility of the population as a form of tourism and labor migration, the reduction of nuclear weapons arsenals, the conversion of military production in the countries of the northern hemisphere – these and other factors at the end of the twentieth century. They “abolished”, as it seemed, the classical laws of geopolitics. Experts saw the future of the global system as a trend towards gradual weakening, up to the abolition of the regime of state borders in the future, and the disappearance of nation-states based on the principle of sovereignty as an unconditional category. However, subsequent events returned the international system to the starting point of the confrontation between the world powers resisting attempts to build a “unipolar world” of a Westernized pattern. The arsenal of geopolitical strategies has once again proved to be a sought-after tool for protecting and promoting national interests. In this article, the author introduces and analyzes the concept of a “geostrategic trap” as a set of measures, as a result of which one of the antagonistic actors of the international system carries out a military entry into “bad territory”, in the struggle for which it wastes its expansionist resources, which again becomes one of the main tools of confrontation between the great powers, avoiding a direct military clash between as part of a hybrid war.