Russia's Empire Is Dead — Long Live the Spinning of Its Corpse

Responding to: Russia Has Lost Its ‘Near Abroad’ — Casey Michel · 2026-06-12

What the Piece Argues

Casey Michel, writing on the Wall Street Journal opinion page, argues that Russia’s long-standing claim to a “near abroad” — a sphere of privileged influence over former Soviet republics — has collapsed under the weight of Vladimir Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine. Ukraine is gaining ground, Moldova’s breakaway region is drifting toward reintegration, Armenia has shrugged off Putin’s threats and is pivoting toward the West, and Central Asian states are openly writing their own histories independent of Moscow’s imperial narrative. Russia, in this telling, is no longer a global power and not even a regional one anymore, and the United States should accelerate this happy collapse by backing Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova, and others who want out from under the Kremlin’s thumb. The piece celebrates the crumbling of an empire.

Receipts

The framing makes the move of declaring a wounded nuclear empire administratively dead so that expanded U.S. intervention can be sold as a cleanup operation rather than a dangerous escalation.

The framing wants you to believe

• Russia has permanently ceded its sphere of influence because its neighbors are diversifying their diplomatic ties and reassessing their imperial histories.
• The U.S. need only maintain steady, escalating support to “expedite” Russia’s inevitable, uncontrolled collapse into geopolitical irrelevance.
• A regional adversary stripped of diplomatic leverage and suffering economic rot has effectively lost its capacity for strategic violence.

What’s really going on

• Dismissing Russia as “no longer a regional power” ignores the operational reality of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. Russia retains approximately 5,580 nuclear warheads (SIPRI Yearbook 2024), maintaining a full-spectrum strategic deterrent that fundamentally contradicts the “collapsed adversary” classification.
• The cui bono of the “Russia is finished” victory lap lands squarely with the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and defense contractors, who use the narrative of a dying adversary to justify permanent, open-ended defense appropriations and expanded global force projection without accounting for the extreme escalation risks of a cornered state.
• Fractured diplomatic influence across Central Asia does not erase the physical realities of regional energy grid dependence and existing security architectures like the CSTO. Defense spending now consumes 6–7% of GDP (IMF Regional Economic Outlook, 2024), fueling measurable domestic industrial growth rather than systemic collapse and proving that imperial retreats are rarely linear.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: Persuadable moderates, good-faith family, or the thoughtful reader who needs a grounded reality check before celebrating a geopolitical victory lap.

Consider the Armenian diplomat in Yerevan navigating a sudden, dangerous pivot toward the European Union while Russian peacekeepers still monitor the edges of his borders, or the Ukrainian drone operator outside Crimea landing precision strikes on a target his commanders insist is a dying relic. It is entirely true that Vladimir Putin’s invasion has severely damaged Russia’s long-term economic prospects and diplomatic standing. Neighbors across Eastern Europe and Central Asia are actively decolonizing their histories and diversifying security partnerships, which is an observable and legitimate trend. But declaring Russia “no longer even a primary regional power” while it maintains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal and operates a fully mobilized war economy is a premature diagnostic. Treating a wounded empire as a corpse invites the very strategic complacency that gets good people killed. We measure actual security by logistics, supply chains, and the capacity for asymmetric leverage, not by the enthusiasm of Washington think tanks issuing premature victory laps.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: Identity-protective mixed-faith actors, op-ed readers, or when you must name the institutional beneficiary without abandoning the analytical high ground.

Consider the Kazakh archivist in Astana quietly rewriting national textbooks to excise Moscow’s imperial footprint, or the Moldovan pensioner in Tiraspol watching his local currency devalue as traditional Russian supply lines stretch dangerously thin. The piece’s central claim—that Russia is finished and America must simply “expedite the process”—reads less like structural analysis and more like a procurement memo for the defense establishment. Kyiv is landing devastating strikes, and former satellites are pulling away; these are the visible fractures. But the load-bearing fact the framing omits is what happens when you declare a nuclear-armed autocracy dead while it shifts a massive share of its industrial output to artillery, drones, and mobilization. The beneficiary of this “collapse” narrative is not the Ukrainian farmer or the Armenian voter. It is the permanent interventionist class in Washington, which uses the promise of a clean, quick victory to lock in decades of defense spending. We build actual security by acknowledging the cold, hard reality of a mobilized adversary, not by granting our own allies the rhetorical victories that keep the Pentagon budget expanding.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: the bystander who needs to see the puppet strings, the reader who will laugh at the right roof and then remember why.

So Casey Michel, director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, writing in the Wall Street Journal — pause here and just admire the marquee. The Journal opinion page, which publishes more kleptocracy apologia before breakfast than most outlets do in a year, running a piece from an anti-kleptocracy guy about how the other empire is losing its kleptocratic clients. It’s like the fox writing a column about how the wolf’s henhouse operation is finally failing, and the henhouse is now free — to be managed by foxes.

The funny part is the architecture. The piece bustles through the former Soviet space like a real estate agent after a foreclosure, pointing at the distressed properties: Look at Ukraine, bleeding Russia on the battlefield — prime strategic asset, ready for Western alignment! Look at Moldova, Transnistria’s economy collapsing — ripe for reintegration under Western gaze! Look at Armenia, hosting EU summits right through Putin’s threats — definitely not a vassal, now available for different patronage! The whole thing reads like an empire liquidation sale, and Michel is the auctioneer with a Human Rights Foundation sticker on his gavel.

And the Central Asia section is the chef’s kiss. Kazakhstan is reclaiming its history from the Golden Horde — a steppe empire that, I should note, was itself an empire. Kyrgyz scholars are calling Sovietization a colonial experience on par with Europe’s colonization of Africa. Michel cites a Kyrgyz-American scholar (American — note it) to tell us that younger generations view their own history through a postcolonial lens, and then the piece just… moves on. No curiosity about what those same scholars might think of Western institutions that fund “postcolonial studies” while advancing American strategic interests. No wonder. The mirror would be awkward.

The piece is a good laugh if you have the stomach for it: a think-tank imperialist, dressed in anti-kleptocracy drag, telling the Journal’s readers that Russia’s sphere of influence has collapsed, which means it is time — finally, urgently, democratically — for America to “expedite this process” and build one.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: the reader who needs to see that what is being celebrated is not liberation but a hostile takeover, and who that hostile takeover serves.

The Human Rights Foundation is the tell. Look at the board. Look at the funders. Look at the programs. Garry Kasparov, the chair — a figure of genuine moral courage against Putin who has also, in his American advocacy, become a reliable amplifier of NATO expansion and American hard-power projection, exactly the kind of “democratic dissident” whose voice is subsidized, elevated, and deployed when it aligns with American strategic interests and ignored when it does not. Thor Halvorssen, the founder — Venezuelan oil family, libertarian activism, a career spent attacking left governments while wearing “human rights” as the jersey. The funding traces through the usual network: the Atlas Network, the National Endowment for Democracy, the constellation of foundations and NGOs that exist to produce exactly the kind of piece Michel has written — a piece in which the decline of one empire’s regional power is treated as a moral victory rather than as a power vacuum that another empire is already filling.

Michel is not a journalist. He is an operative. The Combating Kleptocracy Program he directs does not combat kleptocracy as a structural phenomenon. It combats Russian kleptocracy specifically — which is to say, it combats the rival’s extraction networks so that the home team’s extraction networks can operate without competition. The program’s selective indignation is its operational product. Call it what it is: a soft-power instrument that launders American geopolitical interests through the language of human rights, providing the moral cover the Wall Street Journal opinion page needs to advocate for expanding the American security umbrella without having to use the word “empire.”

The populations in Ukraine, Moldova, and Armenia are not stupid. They know what a power vacuum does. They know the difference between being a Russian client state and being an American client state, and they know that both come with costs. The question the piece refuses to ask is whether these populations, if polled on annexation into NATO’s permanent forward presence, would choose it — or whether they would choose actual neutrality, actual sovereignty, actual non-alignment. Michel’s piece treats non-alignment as if it does not exist. There is only Russia’s orbit and the West’s. Those are the options. Choose. And if you choose wrong, you won’t get a “Combating Kleptocracy Program” devoted to your liberation. You’ll get the treatment that countries outside American favor always get: neglect at best, regime change at worst.

The piece is an imperial staffing memo dressed as a victory lap. It should be read as such.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: the bad-faith audience that needs to see the entire edifice held up to a grotesque mirror.

Welcome to the Wall Street Journal’s new real estate section: Imperial Liquidation Properties. Today’s featured listing: Russia’s “near abroad,” a fixer-upper with good bones, recently distressed by the previous owner’s catastrophic mismanagement, now available for swift American-backed renovation. Ukraine: battle-tested, anti-tank capabilities included, some water damage in the Kakhovka region. Moldova: charming village of Transnistria attached, requires cosmetic reintegration. Armenia: recently de-Russified, one careful owner, now accepting EU summit invitations. Central Asia: historical narrative still under construction, currently being re-themed from Soviet colonial to Golden Horde steppe empire, with optional Chinese silk-road annex. All reasonable offers considered. Financing available through the National Endowment for Democracy.

Casey Michel is our exclusive agent. He comes with references: the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, where kleptocracy is defined as “corruption by people who are not our people, in countries where our people would prefer to do the extracting.” The program’s novel methodology: trace the dirty money, but only the dirty money that flows through Moscow. Dirty money that flows through London, Delaware, or the Cayman Islands is, in this framework, not kleptocracy — it is the legitimate operation of the rules-based international order. The distinction is so precise, so clean, so principled that one almost admires the engineering.

The piece itself is a masterclass in what rhetoricians call frame-engineered relabeling. Russia has a “near abroad” — those are scare quotes, note them, Michel’s title puts the phrase in contemptible italics. THAT empire’s language is illegitimate. But when America claims the right to “expedite” the political orientation of sovereign states through military support, economic pressure, and soft-power apparatuses, that is not an empire. That is “support for Ukraine, as well as Armenia, Moldova and other places.” The mechanics are identical. The language scrubs them. The byline launders them.

And the closing paragraph is the consecration: “America can help reveal Russia for what it is: not a global power — and now, thanks to Mr. Putin, no longer even a regional one.” Translation: our empire gets to be the one that reveals their empire for being an empire. The revealer, in this cosmology, is never revealed. The Human Rights Foundation, the Wall Street Journal, the network of think tanks and foundations and endowments that produced this piece — all of them operating within the largest imperial structure the world has ever seen, none of them capable of seeing it as an empire, all of them congratulating themselves on the death of a rival while extending their own reach into the corpse.

The piece is so perfectly, so flawlessly, so competently what it is that it deserves to be studied. Not for its arguments — those are the standard-issue product of the American foreign-policy class, available in any airport bookstore. But for its form. The architecture of an empire congratulating itself on the death of another empire, in the language of human rights, with the face of an anti-kleptocracy activist, on the op-ed page of the empire’s flagship business newspaper. This is the genre’s platonic ideal. Frame it.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: the reader moved by moral witness with an edge — the congregations who recognize the cadence of Amos, the seminar rooms that have read Fanon.

They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. The prophet Jeremiah’s diagnosis of Jerusalem’s court prophets in the sixth century before the common era — they stood in the temple and declared the empire safe, the threat gone, the rival defeated — while the power they served was busy tightening its grip on the very people they claimed to be freeing.

Casey Michel’s piece in the Journal is a court prophecy for the American empire, and it is a damned lie. It announces the death of one imperial structure — Russia’s “near abroad,” held in the contempt-scar-quotes the title assigns it — and declares the populations once under its boot free. Free to do what? To align. To host summits. To accept support. To “chart their own paths” — provided, as the closing paragraph makes explicit, that those paths are expedited by the United States of America. The freedom being announced is the freedom to choose your master. The prophet calls it peace. There is no peace.

The test the prophet Amos set down — let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream — was not a test of whether the enemy empire had been weakened. It was a test of whether the poor were being fed, the vulnerable protected, the land returned to those who worked it. Michel’s piece mentions none of this. It does not ask whether Ukrainian grain is feeding the hungry or being routed through Black Sea corridors controlled by Western agribusiness. It does not ask whether Armenia’s pivot to the EU will subject its labor market to the same austerity conditionalities that have hollowed out Southern Europe. It does not ask whether Moldova’s reintegration of Transnistria will be managed by the Moldovan people or by the international financial institutions that have spent thirty years turning Eastern Europe into a low-wage export platform. The piece does not ask because the piece is not about these people. The piece is about which great power owns the map.

Frantz Fanon diagnosed this a lifetime ago. The national bourgeoisie of the newly independent state, he wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, does not seek genuine sovereignty. It seeks to take over the intermediary role the colonial administrators once held — to manage the population on behalf of the new metropolitan power, to collect the rents, to wear the suits. Michel’s piece celebrates the emergence of exactly this class across the former Soviet space: the pro-Western elites who will host the summits, sign the agreements, and enforce the terms. They are not charting their own path. They are being selected for management. The empire is not dead. It is being restaffed — and it’s a hell of a deal for the new managers.

The worm that does not die — Isaiah’s phrase, carried into Mark’s gospel — names the consequence that outlasts the event. Russia’s empire is dying. Its worm will not die, and the populations whose land it scarred will live with the scars. But the empire that is stepping into Russia’s place — that empire has its own worm, and Michel cannot see it because the Human Rights Foundation’s funding structure depends on his not seeing it. His piece is not an analysis of imperial decline. It is an imperial staffing memo, witnessed by a court prophet who has mistaken his own employer for the liberation.

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched-Earth

When to use: the reader who needs full catharsis, gloves all the way off, the damned howl the system earns.

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Casey Michel — director of the Combating Kleptocracy Program at the Human Rights Foundation, a title so perfectly engineered to sound like justice while serving empire that it deserves its own goddamn museum exhibit — has written a piece for the Wall Street Journal about how Russia’s empire is dead and isn’t that just wonderful, and by the way, let’s get the American empire into the empty lot before anyone else grabs it.

This is the genre. This is the whole fucking genre. The Journal opinion page runs a piece from a soft-power operative whose entire CV is “attacking the rival empire’s extraction networks so the home team’s extraction networks can operate without competition,” and the piece is titled with the Journal’s signature condescension — scare quotes around “near abroad,” because their imperial language is illegitimate, our imperial language is “support,” “allies,” “partners,” “democratic solidarity.” It’s a ballet. It’s pornography. It’s the American foreign-policy class touching itself while lecturing the rest of us about human rights.

Let’s walk through the house of mirrors. Ukraine is “gaining ground on the battlefield and pressing a decisive advantage with long-range drone strikes.” Notice what’s not in the sentence: the hundreds of thousands of dead Ukrainians, the cities reduced to rubble, the generations of trauma, the fact that Ukraine is being used as a proxy to bleed Russia while American defense contractors book record profits and American politicians take their cut. The dead are the receipt Michel is not allowed to mention, because if you mention the dead you have to ask whether the strategy that produced them was designed to save Ukraine or to destroy Russia — and the answer, if you’re honest, is “both, with Ukraine paying the butcher’s bill for America’s strategic objective.”

Moldova: “the Russian-occupied region of Transnistria is suffering economic collapse and growing more supportive of reintegration.” Translation: the empire we don’t like is losing a client, and the empire we do like is picking it up. Michel doesn’t ask whether reintegration will be managed by the Moldovan people or by the IMF — because he knows the answer, and the fucking answer is the IMF, and the answer is austerity, and the answer is “we’ll help you, sweetheart, just sign here and here and here and don’t read the fine print.”

Armenia: “hosting its first bilateral summit with the European Union” — even after Putin threatened Yerevan with a “Ukrainian scenario.” Brave Armenia! Standing up to the bully! And falling directly into the arms of the other bully, the one with better PR and a longer track record of hollowing out peripheral economies through “association agreements” that are really just debt traps with fancier stationery. The EU is not a liberation movement. The EU is a trade bloc that has spent two decades immiserating Southern Europe and is now hungry for fresh meat in the East. Armenia will learn. They all learn.

Central Asia: Kazakhstan is claiming Golden Horde lineage instead of Russian lineage — fucking brilliant, reclaimed identity, decolonization, let’s all applaud — while its economy is being slowly swallowed by China and its political class is being courted by Washington. The game is the same game. The empires rotate. The populations get shuffled between them. The Human Rights Foundation issues a press release.

And the closer. The goddamn closer: “America can help reveal Russia for what it is: not a global power — and now, thanks to Mr. Putin, no longer even a regional one.” The revealer reveals. The revealer is never revealed. America — the country that has bombed more nations than any other since 1945, that maintains more than 750 military bases across the planet, that has a defense budget larger than the next ten countries combined, that overthrew democratically elected governments from Iran to Chile to Ukraine itself in 2014 — America is the revealer. Not the empire. The revealer of empire. The sheer, undiluted, weapons-grade narcissism of this sentence could power a fucking aircraft carrier.

Michel is a functionary. The Journal is a platform. The Human Rights Foundation is a laundering operation for American geopolitical interests. The whole apparatus — think tanks, op-ed pages, “anti-kleptocracy” programs, national endowments for democracy — is a machine for converting imperial ambition into moral language, and Casey Michel’s piece is the machine running at full capacity. It should be read. It should be studied. And then it should be thrown in the goddamn trash where it belongs, next to every other court prophecy that ever announced peace where there was no peace.

Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. The prophet didn’t say “let American hegemony roll down.” He said justice. You don’t get to substitute your empire for the water and call it the same river. You don’t get to call your clients “liberated” while you’re signing their debt agreements. You don’t get to reveal Russia’s empire while hiding your own behind a Human Rights Foundation letterhead and a Wall Street Journal byline. The cup of trembling you pour for others — the prophet had a word for this — you will drink yourself. And the world will watch the smoke of your burning and ask, as it always asks, whether the next empire will be any different.

Spoiler: it fucking won’t. Not until the populations in the middle stop being chess pieces. Not until the Caseys and the Combating Kleptocracys and the National Endowments for Whatever are understood for what they are. Not until empire itself — all of it, every flag, every base, every “expedited” reorientation — is named for what it is and refused.

Try.

The Deeper Breakdown

The piece doesn’t analyze imperial collapse — it markets it. It frames Russia’s collapse as liberation while selling American influence as the only alternative, never once naming empire. The hidden mechanism: two imperial projects, same zero-sum logic, same populations as prizes.

Who benefits. The concentrated beneficiaries of this framing are the American foreign-policy establishment — the defense contractors, the security-state apparatus, the think-tank and foundation network that depends on the maintenance of American global primacy — and the “pro-Western” elites in the countries being reoriented, who will manage the new dependency on behalf of the new patrons. The Human Rights Foundation itself, as part of this network, benefits directly from the framing: its “Combating Kleptocracy” program is selective in its targets (Russia, not Western-aligned kleptocracies) and its existence depends on the continued relevance of anti-Russian advocacy as a moral cause.

The receipts. The piece’s own language gives away the game. The closing paragraph calls for the United States to “expedite” the process of pulling countries out of Russia’s orbit, and to “reveal Russia for what it is.” This is not a call for sovereignty. It is a call for reorientation under American management. The piece does not ask what the populations of these countries want beyond “not Russia.” It does not mention neutrality, non-alignment, or genuine self-determination as options. The framework is binary: Russia’s orbit or ours. The scarcity of options is the structural content.

The cui bono trace. The Human Rights Foundation — founded by Thor Halvorssen, chaired by Garry Kasparov, funded through the Atlas Network and the National Endowment for Democracy — is part of the same soft-power infrastructure that has, for decades, advanced American strategic interests under the banner of human rights and democracy promotion. Michel’s piece is a product of that infrastructure. It selects its targets (Russia) and its heroes (the countries defecting from Russia’s orbit) based on American strategic interest, not on a universal commitment to human freedom — as the organization’s silence on Western-aligned authoritarian states makes clear.

What’s missing. The piece contains no polling data from Ukraine, Moldova, or Armenia on what their populations actually want from the post-Russian arrangement. It contains no analysis of the costs of Western alignment — the economic conditionalities, the military basing demands, the loss of genuine policy independence. It contains no acknowledgment that the United States itself operates an empire with more military bases, more interventions, and more overthrown governments than Russia has ever managed. The omission is structural. It is what makes the piece function as propaganda rather than as analysis.

Key missing information: Survey data on attitudes toward NATO membership, Western economic integration, and non-alignment in the populations of Ukraine, Moldova, and Armenia — data that would test the piece’s assumption that “not Russia” means “Western-aligned,” and would likely reveal a more complex distribution of preferences than the binary the piece imposes.