In the culture of intelligence operations, a honeytrap is a stratagem designed to lure a target into a compromising or incriminating narrative that appears self-sabotaging but is in fact unscrupulously engineered from beginning to end to secure a preordained outcome.
Our popular notion of a honeytrap comes from the old-school, fictionalized version that James Bond specialized in first disarming, then shagging — the double agent assembled from profiling-customized parts to be ostensibly irresistible, wielding a spiked martini or an ingeniously concealed stiletto.
As an element of the 21st-century narrative warfare currently being waged to undermine democracy — from repugnant performative presidencies to Cecil B. DeMille-scale disruption sieges — a honeytrap can be anything from an offer too good to refuse to a catastrophe too horrible to ignore.
Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked, criminal war against the democracy of Ukraine also serves as a new world order proxy provocation against NATO, Europe, the West and — as the democracy degradation target of greatest strategic value — the United States. That war has already been unprecedented in its deployment of propaganda — including a firehose of falsehood that started in the “pick a casus belli, any casus belli” phase.