Iran’s top security body has labeled the sudden US moves to send an aircraft carrier and bombers to the Middle East a form of “psychological warfare”.

John Bolton announced Sunday that the United States was deploying the Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group and a bomber taskforce to the Middle East as a message to Iran. The national security adviser did not provide a full explanation of what prompted the initiative.

A spokesman for Iran’s supreme national security council dismissed the move, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported on Tuesday. “Bolton’s statement is a clumsy use of a burnt-out happening, for psychological warfare,” said spokesman Keyvan Khosravi, also with a tinge of mystery to his reference.

The deployment was meant to send a message that “unrelenting force” would meet any Iranian attack on the US or its allies, and was in response to “troubling and escalatory” signs of a potential attack on US forces in the region, Bolton 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 or regular Iranian forces,” he said.

Patrick Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, added on Monday that the US was responding to a “credible threat” from Iran, but gave no details.

The aircraft carrier was already in the Mediterranean Sea and was on the way to the Middle East anyway, though officials said its trip would be speeded up. Rotations of US troops and military hardware around the world are routine and usually take place without fanfare.

“The deployment seems to be a ‘regularly scheduled’ one by the US navy, and Bolton has just tried to talk it up,” Iran’s state-run Press TV earlier said.

Brig Gen Hossein Dehgan, a military adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said the United States was “neither willing nor capable” of carrying out an attack on Iran, the semi-official news agency ISNA reported.

And Iranian newspapers and commentators have widely dismissed the announcement as a “bluff and “empty rhetoric”.

The latest moves come amid escalating tensions between the US and Iran.

Donald Trump’s administration announced it was ending waivers that let countries buy oil from Iran despite US sanctions, aiming to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero. Oil prices spiked as a result.

The US also designated Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, the first time they have added a branch of a foreign military to that blacklist.

Wednesday marks the first anniversary of the US withdrawal from the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, negotiated by the administration of Barack Obama, and Trump and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani are expected to mark the day by raising the stakes.

This followed reports early on Tuesday that US secretary of state Mike Pompeo, traveling overseas, was headed to an unnamed destination, from where reporters accompanying him would not be able to file dispatches.

The mystery was partly solved a few hours later with news that Pompeo was canceling a trip to Germany to visit leader Angela Merkel in Berlin, and is instead heading for Russia.