Heine on the Power of Latin America Amid US-Venezuela Tensions for CGTN
In a panel discussion for DIALOGUE–CGTN shared on December 23, 2025, Ambassador Jorge Heine investigated the Trump administration’s reasons behind heightening tensions with Venezuela and its path towards a serious military confrontation. Heine was joined by Professor Jiang Shixue, Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Shanghai University; Ben Norton, Editor-in-Chief of the Political Economy Report; and hosted by Qinduo Xu.
This conversation arose during rising aggressions from the U.S onto Venezuela, starting with Washington unleashing a series of attacks on Venezuelan boats leading to a naval blockade of their oil tankers, which Heine calls a “de facto declaration of war”. Experts have seen it as a push to lay claim to Venezuela’s oil reserves, which are the largest in the world. Further insight has led Heine to suspect that Trump wishes to remove President Maduro as a way to win back Latin American voters after a long series of deportations damaged his approval ratings in these communities.
In recent discussions, the Monroe Doctrine has been called upon as Trump attempts to isolate Venezuela and Latin America from dealings across the world. Heine mentioned that historically the Doctrine evokes significant pushback in Latin America, which reminisces of a time of gunboat diplomacy. He said, “It takes us back 100-200 years to negotiations that were thought to belong to the past.” Meanwhile, Latin America today has greatly improved and diversified its dealings with global economies such as China and India. He elaborated on how taking away the power that countries in Latin America now hold would be an impossible endeavor,
The #1 trading partner to South America as a whole is China; not the US and not Europe. This is not something that can be undone from one day to the next by some decision from the US government. Latin America is part of the world today; it is open to the world, trades with the world, it gets investment from the world, and therefore this is something that will not work.
When Xu asked to consider the irony in the Trump administration’s heavy hand in deporting Latin American refugees but expecting there will be more to come if war breaks out between the US and Venezuela, Heine had this to say,
[Experts have argued] that a land invasion of Venezuela by the US would be a bit of a cakewalk, it would be like the invasion of panama in 1989, and that it wouldn’t be like Iraq or Libya. This of course is nonsense, Venezuela is a country of 30 million people, has a vast land extension, there are gorilla movements in neighboring Colombia, and there are lots of armed groups. What we might have, if there is a US land invasion, would be a situation similar to Libya’s, who was invaded by NATO forces in 2011 and 15 years later there is still a civil war going on. A land invasion of Venezuela might lead exactly to the eternal wars that Trump campaigned against in 2024.
As tensions continue to rise in the waters around Venezuela, Heine considered the possible end-game for the United States, “the White House is caught between a rock and a hard place, it doesn’t have any good or easy options, they’re all bad. That is why [the Trump administration] have resorted to this blockade of oil traffic.”
The full interview can be watched here.
A former research professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Jorge Heine is a diplomat, international relations scholar, and lawyer. He is currently a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute. He has served as an ambassador of Chile to China, India, and South Africa. Heine has written over fifteen books, including The Non-Aligned World: Striking Out in an Era of Great Power Competition (2025), which provides insights on how the Global South can navigate the changing diplomatic landscape amid the U.S.-China rivalry.