Not really. During the cold war the vast majority of "democratic" countries were either allied with, or close trading partners with, the United States. This lead to the increasing strengthening of ties between both countries foreign intelligence services and judicial systems.
Given that the US has a burn the fields type of policy with all but their largest trading partners, only the very large countries are able to use the case of Snowden to their advantage. Hong Kong was especially good, since it provided the best of both worlds: Very liberal media, with Chinese backing in terms of political pressure.
The only reason that some small countries are able to afford long term sanction to Snowden and Assange, is that they are already antagonistic towards the United States, so there is nothing that the US can really take away from them.
Iceland is a bit a strange case since it is generally aligned with the west, but it hasn't really taken steps to integrate as closely as other countries, partially because of its isolation and Norway being a proxy for these decisions for so long. Ultimately though it isn't in Iceland's interests to take in Snowden, it will cause too much of a backlash.
Yes, I get why they aren't doing it strategically, but they're supposed to be democratic countries and protect this sort of stuff on its own merits, not depending on what's their relationship with the country where the whistleblower is coming from.
Most democratic countries have a very nation-state-oriented view of democracy, where it's a group of people who rule themselves democratically. That tends to lead towards emphasizing citizenship a lot, so e.g. many European countries would be much stricter about conditions under which they'd extradite one of their own citizens. But Snowden isn't one of their citizens, so falls in a different category of basically "not our responsibility".
> they're supposed to be democratic countries and protect this sort of stuff on its own merits
Considering that the entire point of a democracy is a compromise from principles to practicality, I'm surprised you expect a democratic country to be impractical for the sake of principle.
Given that the US has a burn the fields type of policy with all but their largest trading partners, only the very large countries are able to use the case of Snowden to their advantage. Hong Kong was especially good, since it provided the best of both worlds: Very liberal media, with Chinese backing in terms of political pressure.
The only reason that some small countries are able to afford long term sanction to Snowden and Assange, is that they are already antagonistic towards the United States, so there is nothing that the US can really take away from them.
Iceland is a bit a strange case since it is generally aligned with the west, but it hasn't really taken steps to integrate as closely as other countries, partially because of its isolation and Norway being a proxy for these decisions for so long. Ultimately though it isn't in Iceland's interests to take in Snowden, it will cause too much of a backlash.