With the two-year anniversary of America’s hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan just around the corner, it looks like President Biden is closing in on an unofficial deal with Iran over that country’s nuclear program. This is happening even though America has no formal diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic, which it has long designated as a state sponsor of terror. 

There have been, as the Sun has reported, stirrings in recent weeks of an imminent American-Iranian agreement that would see the removal of sanctions and that would allow the Islamic Republic to essentially be a threshold nuclear power. That unofficial and, significantly, mostly unwritten entente now looks closer than ever to coming to bitter fruition.

Israel in particular would not appreciate any form of lenience with its arch-enemy Iran, however cloaked in the language of even-keeled platitudes about mutual understanding and so forth such an agreement might be. For years, directly and through its regional proxies, Iran has taunted Israel with threats of annihilation. Tehran’s invisible hand has bankrolled Palestinian militancy in Gaza and underwritten Hezbollah’s immense rocket arsenal in Lebanon.

So while Mr. Biden and his man about the world, Secretary of State Blinken, can be expected to tweet and coo in the coming days about doing their level best to tamp down concerns over Iran’s ostensibly peaceful nuclear energy program, expect hackles to be raised at Jerusalem, with all that that implies. 

The contours of the imminent deal, about which Israeli officials have known for weeks, are as follows: Iran will trim its enrichment of uranium to 60 percent, which is more than what was allowed under the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which was signed by President Obama in 2015 and subsequently scrapped by President Trump. It is less than the 90 percent threshold that it considered the breakout to build a nuclear weapon. 

The Jerusalem Post reported on Thursday that Washington warned Iran in unofficial talks held recently in Oman that if it were to enrich uranium to 90 percent, the price it will pay would be a heavy one. What that means exactly is not immediately clear, nor is at all clear that anyone in Iran’s hardline anti-American regime takes veiled threats seriously. As part of the deal, Iran will also free American citizens it is currently holding in prison. 

Sweeter for Iran is that, as the Jerusalem Post also is reporting, Washington will waive standing sanctions so that Iraq can pay more than $10 billion it owes Iran for gas and electricity (last week a sanction waiver allowed Iraq to pay out nearly $3 billion) and for South Korea to pay it $7 billion for oil imports. And, as the New York Times first reported, Iran will pledge to halt sales of ballistic missiles to Russia and will put the brakes on its proxies’ attacks on American contractors in Syrian and Iraq.

The Times also reported that Washington will neither levy additional sanctions on Iran nor pursue resolutions against Tehran at the United Nations Security Council or International Atomic Energy Agency. Furthermore, Washington will agree to not seize foreign tankers shipping Iranian oil. 

If all that sounds like an improbable American play for tacit normalization of relations with a country where stomping on basic human rights is the norm and burning American and Israeli flags is a national pastime, not everybody in Washington is buying it. 

In the first place, by keeping his dealings with Iran under the radar — despite a cascading flow of details from U.S. officials appearing in both leading American and Israeli publications — a congressional review can be avoided. According to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Act of 2015, the president must notify Congress of any nuclear-related agreement with Iran within five days. It also stipulates that the president must “determine the agreement in no way compromises the commitment of the United States to Israel’s security, nor its support for Israel’s right to exist.”

If the imminent agreement is so ironclad, why try to conceal it  from Congress? A group of senators including Lindsey Graham, the Republican of South Carolina, and Bob Menendez, the Democrat of New Jersey who also heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have gone one step further by tabling the Iranian Enrichment Monitoring Act. If passed, the bill would require inter alia the national intelligence director — that’s Avril Haines, currently — to ping Congress within two days if Iran takes its uranium enrichment capacity past the 60 percent threshold. 

Mr. Graham has said that “there is no legitimate civilian purpose for Iran to have uranium enriched to this level – the only reason is for military purposes. This legislation will ensure that Congress is informed in a timely manner of advancements by Iran regarding their desire to build a nuclear weapon.”

Mr. Menendez stated: “Every minute counts when it comes to monitoring the dangerous advancements in Iran’s nuclear program. The Iranian regime continues to push the limits with its enrichment, and we must be vigilant to ensure it never gets a nuclear weapon.”

What gives Mr. Biden cause to trust Iran? A de facto nuclear deal with the real mullahs of Tehran — who have likely not forgotten America’s ignominious retreat from Kabul — kicks the single most vital security issue in the Middle East today down the road and out of the way ahead of the next presidential election in 2024. Yet history shows that is a long time in the Middle East. A blinkered view from the Biden administration belies the reality that in that space of time, truly anything can happen.