In a late Sunday statement warning — without any evidence whatsoever — of “troubling and escalatory” actions by the Iranian government, U.S. national security advisor John Bolton used the scheduled deploymentof an American aircraft carrier and bomber task force to the Middle East to threaten Iran with military action.

The United States, said Bolton, “is deploying the USS Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group and a bomber task force to the U.S. Central Command region 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.”

Foreign policy analysts and international observers were quick…