Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman says the USA has created a sort of international tyranny

'And so the first thing is that the operation itself was very skilfully managed. The second is that it's entirely illegal, indecent, an atrocity really. And I think it put an end to three centuries of effort to develop a rule of law facsimile internationally, starting with the 18th century and going on. And the last 50 years of the 20th century, or much of the 20th century, was spent by the United States trying to promote a revision of the rule of law internationally. That decayed, by the time of the Biden administration, into something called the Rules-Bound Order, which was basically: we make the rules and we enforce them on whomever we wish and exempt whomever we wish, including ourselves, from the rules. But I think what we're seeing is an international reaction that is building to this really outrageous repudiation of the whole idea of rules internationally.'


'I think, frankly, we've seen with the case of Gaza that words of outrage accomplish nothing. If the United States is not subjected to sanctions by the global majority—if it doesn’t pay a price, particularly its business elite—I think what we're looking at is a horror.'


'At the same time that he's accusing Maduro of doing something, he's pardoning someone who actually did what he's accusing Maduro of doing, mostly falsely. A final note here: of course, the U.S. is asserting jurisdiction over Maduro. The Vienna Convention gives absolute immunity to a head of state or government, so this is completely illegal under international law. 

But this is taking place in the southern district of New York, which is the most corrupt judicial system in the entire United States. And it will be very interesting to see the trial because if you read the indictment, it's basically a political speech with a lot of ideological baloney. I don't think there's much legal in there, and I don't know whether, as corrupt as that jurisdiction is, they can get a conviction.
Of course, the precedent here that everybody cites is George H.W. Bush going to Panama and removing Noriega as the president, and then in convicting him of narcotics offenses and putting him in jail and so forth. That was widely condemned at the time as utterly illegal. It was. It's not a helpful precedent. But we have just set a precedent which is rightly regarded by smaller countries all over the world as very dangerous for them. We don't seem to think it's dangerous for us, but I suspect it is.
And what will happen in the Ukraine context? Will Russia now feel they can abduct Zelensky from Kiev? It has the capability to do that. So, you know, what have we started?'