I do call the US "an empire", but I don't refer to "The American Empire" in a discussion of geopolitics. It reeks of bias. The GP wrote "Russian Empire", capita

I do call the US "an empire", but I don't refer to "The American Empire" in a discussion of geopolitics. It reeks of bias. The GP wrote "Russian Empire", capitalized, which is the name of a polity that didn't exist in the late 20th century. (And then they later edited their comment to say "(aka the USSR)" to make me look overly pedantic.)