Could A U.S.-Venezuela And Another Israel-Iran War Overlap In 2026?

By Paul Iddon

President Donald Trump has declared that he refuses to rule out the possibility of a U.S. war with Venezuela. His comments come shortly ahead of a scheduled meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Dec. 29, when the Israeli premier is expected to brief the president another strike against Iran.

The U.S. decisively intervened alongside Israel at the end of the 12-day war in June by bombing underground Iranian nuclear sites and also intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles and drones fired at Israel.

However, if Washington finds itself mired in a costly conflict with Venezuela in 2026, that could strain its military resources and potentially limit its ability to help defend Israel if another war with Iran breaks out, which is a strong possibility in the coming months.

Israeli officials raised the alarm to the Trump administration over an Iranian missile exercise over the weekend, expressing fears it could be a cover for a barrage against Israel.

There is a high risk that another war could break out between the two adversaries due to a misunderstanding or calculation that the other is preparing an imminent attack they must preempt, Axios reported.

Since the 12-day war, which saw the Israeli Air Force bombard targets across Iran and the U.S. join in to hit Iran’s main nuclear sites with strategic B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, Tehran has scrambled to rebuild and expand its missile program.

As a result, today Israel perceives the Iranian missile program as a much greater, more imminent threat in the short to medium-term than the nuclear program.

Iranian officials have openly said that in another war, it will have the capacity to hit Israel with as many as 2,000 missiles in a single attack. That’s almost four times as many as Iran managed to fire at Israel throughout the entirety of the 12-day war.

Netanyahu may enlist Trump’s support for another preemptive Israeli campaign against Iran’s missile program before Tehran can achieve its stated goals.

However, if tensions around Venezuela degenerate into an all-out war in the meantime, the U.S. may not be able to support Israel or defend it to the extent it did in June.

Any U.S. war in Venezuela aimed at overthrowing Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro could rapidly become a quagmire not wholly unlike the costly and controversial 2003-11 Iraq War.

While analysts expect the U.S. to prevail in conventional battles over Venezuela, it could end up fighting protracted counterinsurgency campaigns against dispersed Venezuelan militias for years to come. It’s worth bearing in mind that Venezuela is twice the size of Iraq.

Even the opening conventional phase of any Venezuela war could see the U.S. Navy expend significant numbers of Tomahawk cruise missiles and some Standard-series air defense interceptor missiles—the SM-2s, SM-3s, and SM-6s fired from U.S. destroyers—to cripple the Venezuelan military in a bid to bring Maduro to heel.

The U.S. has already expended eye-watering quantities of these multi-million-dollar missiles in the numerous post-October 2023 conflicts in the Middle East.

In January 2024 alone, the U.S. launched 80 Tomahawks against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen in response to the group’s targeting of Israel and commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Tomahawk production in recent years has ranged from 55 to 90 new missiles a year. Furthermore, as of January 2025, the U.S. Navy fired at least 120 SM-2, 80 SM-6, and 20 SM-3 and Evolved Sea Sparrow missiles to fend off Houthi drones and missiles, both ballistic and cruise, over the preceding 15 months.

The USS Dwight D. Eisenhower carrier strike group alone fired 155 Standard missiles and 135 Tomahawks against the Houthis during a nine-month deployment that concluded in mid-2025.

During Operation Midnight Hammer, the U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear program at the end of the 12-day war, the U.S. fired 30 Tomahawks at an Iranian nuclear facility in Isfahan.

During that same war, the U.S. fired an estimated 80 SM-3 interceptors against Iranian ballistic missiles and 150 ground-based Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors.

These cost around $10 million each and are among the most sophisticated interceptors in the entire U.S. arsenal. That war also saw Israel expend a substantial number of its high-end Arrow 3 missile interceptors, which are also the most sophisticated and expensive in its multi-layered air defense.

President Trump’s decision to order the USS Gerald R. Ford, the most advanced aircraft carrier in the U.S. Navy, from the Mediterranean to South America in October now means there aren’t any U.S. carriers near the Middle East.

Until recently, there were sometimes two carrier strike groups in the region at once, with deployments often extended. Trump’s move was demonstrative of how serious tensions with Venezuela have gotten in recent months.

If war ultimately does break out there, that could sap the U.S. military’s ability to readily surge air and naval assets into the Middle East in the event of another Israel-Iran war.

That could prove advantageous for Iran if it means less U.S. air defenses, especially the navy’s Standard missiles, are available in the region to provide Israel’s air defenses with an additional outer-defensive layer. It could also lead to a fatal miscalculation if either or both believe they must act preemptively to avoid a more costly conflict down the road.

Whatever happens, one cannot readily dismiss the risk of overlapping wars in the Middle East and South America breaking out in 2026. And the consequences of both could well have global ramifications.