BRUSSELS, May 11 — Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 150 miles off Iran’s coast as the backdrop today to warn the country that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting off oil routes or “gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”

Little of what Mr. Cheney said in the cavernous hangar bay of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John C. Stennis, one of two carriers whose strike groups are now in the Persian Gulf, was new. Each individual line had, in some form, been said before, at various points in the four-year-long nuclear standoff with Iran, and during the increasingly tense arguments over whether Iran is aiding the insurgents in Iraq.

But Mr. Cheney stitched all of those warnings together, and the symbolism of sending the administration’s most famous hawk to deliver the speech so close to Iran’s coast was unmistakable.

It also came just a week after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked briefly and inconclusively with Iran’s foreign minister, a step toward re-engagement with Iran that some in the administration have opposed.