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

Mr. Cheney said little new in his speech, delivered from the cavernous hangar bay of the John C. Stennis, one of the two carriers in the Persian Gulf. Each line had, in some form, been said before at various points in the four-year nuclear standoff with Iran, and during the increasingly tense arguments over whether Tehran is aiding 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 them so close to Iran’s coast was unmistakable. It also came just a week after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had talked briefly and inconclusively with Iran’s foreign minister, a step toward re-engagement with Iran that some in the administration have opposed.

Mr. Cheney’s sharp warnings appeared to be part of a two-track administration campaign to push back at Iran while leaving the door open to negotiations. It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States offered to negotiate with Iran as long as it first agreed to stop enriching uranium, a decision in which Mr. Cheney, participants said, was not a major player.

Senior officials said Mr. Cheney’s speech was not circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered. A senior American diplomat added, “He still kind of runs by his own rules.”

The speech was reminiscent of Mr. Cheney’s speeches about Iraq in August 2002, which argued against sending weapons inspectors back into Iraq and laid bare the split within the administration over how to deal with Saddam Hussein. But the circumstances with Iran are quite different. American officials say that so many troops are tied up in Iraq, and Iran has so much power to cause disruption there and in the oil markets, that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be an enormous risk.

“This is about saber-rattling, and power projection,” one senior State Department official said yesterday. “And who better to do it?”

When President Bush ordered the two carriers into the Persian Gulf last year, senior officials said it was part of an effort to gain some negotiating leverage. About the same time, American military personnel began capturing some Iranians in Iraq, and some are still being held there. American officials have also been pressing European banks and companies to avoid doing business with Iran, hoping to disrupt its efforts to recycle its oil profits.

Oil seemed to be on Mr. Cheney’s mind yesterday when he told 3,500 to 4,000 members of the Stennis’s crew that Iran would not be permitted to choke off oil shipments.

“With two carrier strike groups in the gulf, we’re sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike,” he said, according to an official transcript of his remarks. “We’ll keep the sea lanes open. We’ll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We’ll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We’ll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we’ll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”

Some Iran experts have questioned whether the threats delivered by administration officials help or hurt diplomacy with Iran.

“The problem with the two-track policy is that the first track — coercion, sanctions, naval deployments — can undercut the results on the second track,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran scholar at the Council of Foreign Relations.

“There are some in Tehran who will look at Cheney on that carrier and say that everything Rice is offering is not real,” he said.

He added, “This is a case where we are trying to get through negotiations what, so far, we couldn’t get through coercion.”

Without question, symbols of coercion were part of the backdrop: Mr. Cheney spoke in front of five F/A-18 warplanes. While he never said so, it is clear to the Iranians that several of their major nuclear sites, including the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, are within reach of the Navy’s weapons.

But mindful of the lasting imagery of President Bush on another carrier, there were no signs proclaiming success, much less “Mission Accomplished.” Instead, Mr. Cheney repeated his arguments about the danger of early withdrawal from Iraq, suggesting that it would empower Iran.

“This world can be messy and dangerous, but it’s a world made better by American power and American values,” he told the cheering crew. He then reached back to some language Mr. Bush had previously used to describe the goals of Al Qaeda — the word caliphate, which the president has avoided in recent times.

“Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants believe they can wear us down, break our will, force us out and make Iraq a safe haven for terror,” Mr. Cheney said. “They see Iraq as the center of a new caliphate, from which they can stir extremism and violence throughout the region, and eventually carry out devastating attacks against the United States and others.”

This past week Iran’s capricious and dangerous government jailed the Iranian-American scholar Haleh Esfandiari. Her unjustified arrest came after authorities barred her from leaving the country and after weeks of harassment clearly intended to intimidate one of the United States’ most distinguished analysts of Iranian politics.

Ms. Esfandiari must be immediately released and allowed to return to her family. The world and the citizens of Iran are watching to see how its leaders treat this advocate of improved relations between Washington and Tehran.

Ms. Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East program at the nonpartisan Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has lived in the United States since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Over the past decade she has visited her aging mother in Iran twice a year. At the end of her most recent visit, on Dec. 30, three masked, knife-wielding men stole her luggage, including her American and Iranian passports. When she went to replace her documents, she was sent to the Intelligence Ministry for the first of many unwarranted interrogations. On Tuesday, she was taken to the Evin prison, where an Iranian- Canadian photographer was beaten to death in 2003.

Repressive regimes are congenitally paranoid, but how Iranian officials can believe they will benefit from Ms. Esfandiari’s imprisonment is impossible to understand. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is under severe pressure at home and abroad. Jailing Ms. Esfandiari will only increase those pressures, further weakening Iran’s standing with the rest of the world and his own standing with Iran’s citizens.

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A Navy F/A-18 fighter jet is seen in the background as Vice President Dick Cheney arrives to greet sailors and Marines at a rally aboard the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, Friday, May 11, 2007. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert) (Gerald Herbert - AP)

Aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf 150 miles off Iran's coast, Vice President Cheney warned Tehran yesterday that the United States and its allies will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, close off vital sea lanes for oil supplies, or control the Middle East.

Cheney issued the blunt warning during his Middle East tour, and just two days before Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes his own trip to the Gulf. The two visits reflect the growing rivalry between Washington and Tehran for influence in the region.

"Throughout the region our country has interests to protect and commitments to honor," Cheney told Navy staff aboard the USS John C. Stennis. "With two carrier strike groups in the Gulf, we're sending clear messages to friends and adversaries alike. We'll keep the sea lanes open. We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats. We'll disrupt attacks on our own forces. We'll continue bringing relief to those who suffer and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom."

Despite Cheney's tough talk, however, the United States faces so many challenges in Iraq that it is also trying to launch diplomatic dialogue with Tehran to help stabilize the war-ravaged country. As Cheney spoke in the Gulf -- after stops in Iraq and the United Arab Emirates -- the State Department was working to set up a meeting in the next two weeks between senior U.S. and Iranian officials in Baghdad, U.S. officials said Friday.

The divergent approaches toward Iran reflect the tensions within the administration, particularly between the State Department and the vice president's office about whether to engage with Iran and, if so, how far to go. The bilateral talks being planned and the scope of discussion will be reviewed after the vice president returns from his tour next week, U.S. officials say.

Some in the administration refer to the divergence as a good-cop, bad-cop strategy, while others say that it reflects a deep policy divide, with Cheney trying to stall or undermine diplomatic outreach efforts.

Analysts say U.S. strategy is instead simply contradictory. "On the one hand, U.S. policy involves a series of coercive steps -- U.N. resolutions, financial sanctions, arresting Iran's operatives in Iraq, trying to mobilize the Gulf states against Iran, giving the kind of speeches with symbolism done today -- that is quite comprehensive," said Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations. "On the other side, it's an offer to negotiate that is not well laid out. But the conciliatory effort is totally negated by the coercive steps, which is why it's not working."

The United States also may have limited leverage in using either diplomacy or pressure to win Iran's cooperation, given that the changing realities in Iraq increasingly favor Iran.

"There's a critical difference between U.S. time and Iranian time when it comes to Iraq," said Anthony H. Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "The U.S. is under more pressure by the day to leave Iraq as soon as possible. Iran is watching, on the other hand, a political structure where Iraqi Shiites with close ties to Iran are gaining in power."

The bilateral talks were agreed to by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at the international summit on the future of Iraq last week, according to senior U.S., Iraqi and Iranian officials. The meeting is an alternative to the failed Iraqi initiative to bring Rice together with her Iranian counterpart last week in Egypt. Details of the meeting are being worked out through Swiss and Iraqi officials and other channels.

The lead U.S. representative would probably be U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, U.S. officials say. Iran has not yet determined its delegation, but senior diplomat Abbas Araghchi has represented Tehran at two earlier meetings of Iraq's neighbors also attended by U.S. officials.

State Department officials hope the initial talks can later involve senior officials and address a broader range of subjects -- effectively launching a long-term bilateral process. But U.S. officials stress that talks in Baghdad would be limited to Iraq, while the international dispute over Iran's nuclear program will be conducted only by a group including the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany.

The U.S. diplomatic effort is also vulnerable because of the growing outcry over Iran's detention of Americans over six months. Democratic presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton as well as three senior lawmakers yesterday called for the immediate release of Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian American scholar imprisoned in Iran on Tuesday after more than four months under virtual house arrest.

"The Iranian government's detention of this 67-year-old grandmother and scholar shows its complete disregard for basic human rights," Obama said in a statement. "If the Iranian government has any desire to engage the world in dialogue, it can demonstrate that desire by releasing this champion of dialogue from detention."

In a joint statement, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski and Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin, both Maryland Democrats, urged Iran to make a "gesture of goodwill" to the American people by immediately releasing Esfandiari, who is director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a Potomac resident.

Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said he plans to call on his congressional colleagues to pass a resolution demanding Esfandiari's "immediate and unconditional release." The imprisonment "shows a gross disregard for the rule of law and belies statements by Iranian government officials that Iran would like to improve relations with the United States," Van Hollen said.