What the United States is signaling in Venezuela is not merely a dispute over one government, one election, or one leader. It is a warning to the world that international law—already fragile, already selectively enforced—has now been openly pushed aside. And this warning comes from a man who presents himself as a global peacemaker, a would-be Nobel laureate, a self-styled dealmaker who claims to have “ended” nearly twenty wars that exist largely in his own imagination.