[pasabagi]

I guess the thing that weirds me out about this is not that 'special rules' are applying: if you look at history, they often do. Rather, it's just such a mistake. We're moving in a multipolar world where the US's preeminence is absolutely and explicitly dependent on its position in a 'rules based global order', as the leader of a set of democracies that champion the rule of law. We're also living through an unprecedented era of domestic disillusionment about the rule of law, its enforcement, fairness, and consistency. The US needs its allies more than ever, but it's also leaning on them to do things (rendition, extradition) that are both domestically unpopular and broadly inconsistent with their laws.

I think when historians look back at this era, from the second gulf war on, they'll see it as an era where the US essentially squandered an amazing soft-power position by ridiculously clumsy, arrogant, and petty behavior. And it's being enabled by group think. It's obvious from an outside perspective that all this kind of thing does is undermines the US at home and abroad, and gives ammunition to the Chinese or Russian state line that basically the US are a bunch of hypocrites, and the rules based global order is a sham, or gives ammunition to the left and right of american domestic politics to say that DC is a swamp, for literally no strategic gain. I mean, who really cares about Assange? I certainly don't. I do care about the ability of journalists to do their work without fear of persecution, and even if people don't care about that, they should care about the raw strategic incompetence of what the US is trying to do here.