Anjana Pasricha in New Delhi contributed to this report.
WHITE HOUSE — U.S. officials were keeping mum Monday on what signals from Iran were responsible for an unusual statement issued the previous evening by National Security Advisor John Bolton.
A “number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings” linked to Iran prompted the United States to deploy an aircraft carrier strike group and bomber task force to the Middle East, said Bolton in his statement.
The dispatch is intended to “send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force,” added Bolton.
Both the National Security Council and Defense Department declined, when contacted by VOA, to provide any additional details.
In addition to the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier, the strike group included fighter jets, helicopters, destroyers and more than 6,000 sailors when it left its U.S. port in (the state of) Virginia in early April.
The Nimitz-class carrier was in the Adriatic Sea as of May 1 when Albania’s president, Ilir Meta, visited the 333-meter-long vessel.
The deployment of the strike group had been planned “for some time now,” the chief of naval operations, Admiral John Richardson confirmed on Monday.
Speaking at a maritime exposition in the state of Maryland, Richardson, in response to a question at a seminar, characterized Bolton’s statement as a “great demonstration” of the navy’s capability to fluidly react to changing security situations.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking to reporters traveling with him to Europe, declined to comment about what prompted the U.S. decision, but confirmed it had been under consideration for a while and that the administration has “good reason” to want to clearly communicate to Iran how it would respond to Iranian actions.
Bolton’s statement said the United States “is not seeking war with the Iranian regime, but we are fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”
New America Foundation Fellow Ned Price says recent actions to sanction the IRGC and end sanctions waivers for some of the country’s biggest oil buyers make it seem like the Trump administration “seems intent on driving the Iranians into a corner.”
“The concern with Bolton’s threat — coming in the midst of a series of escalations from the Trump administration — underscores the concern that the administration is trying to goad the Iranians into an unwise and ill-considered reaction,” Price, a former spokesman for the Obama-era National Security Council, tells VOA.
The Trump administration has been working to apply what it calls a “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran to try to get the country to change its behavior, including its sponsorship of terror groups and what the White House alleges is a ballistic missile program that threatens the United States.
In response to last month’s U.S. designation of the IRGC as a terrorist group, Iran responded by declaring the United States a state sponsor of terrorism and its forces in the Middle East as terror groups.
Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities, a research group that advocates that America maintain a strong, dynamic military but wants it to try to avoid being deployed in overseas wars. DePetris says that while Iran is meddlesome, the threats it poses can best be addressed with deterrence and diplomacy.
“Maximum pressure will fail to change the regime’s behavior, but it will ratchet up tensions between the U.S. and Iran, possibly inciting a crisis or war, something Trump promised to avoid during his campaign,” DePetris tells VOA. “This is more evidence of a troublesome disconnect between the president and the people who ostensibly work under him. The Iranians are meddlesome actors, but they’re far from a threat to the U.S., the world’s only superpower.”
The vice president of the Heritage Foundation’s Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy praises the U.S. move.
“The U.S. is a global power with global interests and responsibilities,” James Jay Carafano tells VOA. “It’s a powerful statement to demonstrate the U.S. is not distracted by a host of challenges-in Venezuela, by provocations from North Korea, and yet, the U.S. has the resolve and capacity to show it can stand strong in the Middle East, as well.”
Bolton’s statement is raising concern in other countries.
India, whose economy is largely fueled by imported crude — much of it from Middle East countries such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia — is worried about the security of sea lanes through which its energy supplies flow.
“If you have a situation where Iran and America are actually entering into a confrontationist mode, then that will not only impact the two countries but the larger region,” says security analyst Harsh Pant at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
“The question of what happens to the larger region, what happens to the sea lanes of communication, I think that is going to be a challenge if this results in something bigger… India will wait and watch and see how far it goes.”
India, which has friendly relations with Iran and a growing strategic partnership with the United States, is also under pressure to slash oil imports from Iran.
Except for saying that there will be additional supplies from other oil-producing countries, New Delhi has not stated clearly whether it plans to bring down its imports from Iran to zero as the United States wants.
There has been no immediate reaction from Iran to Bolton’s statement.
One week ago, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused Bolton and others, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, of “designing confrontation,” but added that he did not “think military confrontation will happen.”
Speaking to CBS News, Zarif accused the U.S. administration of “putting things in place for accidents to happen. And there has to be extreme vigilance, so that people who are planning this type of accident would not have their way.”