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 interna-tional 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. Ex-perts saw the future of the global system as a trend towards gradual weakening, up to the abolition of the re-gime of state borders in the future, and the disappearance of nation-states based on the principle of sovereign-ty 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 Western-ized pattern. The arsenal of geopolitical strategies has once again proved to be a sought-after tool for protect-ing and promoting national interests. In this article, the author introduces and analyzes the concept of a “geo-strategic trap” as a set of measures, as a result of which one of the antagonistic actors of the international sys-tem 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 mili-tary clash between as part of a hybrid war.