In practice, what’s shaping up looks more like an unwritten agreement of which a significant portion is already starting to be implemented. The Biden administration is declining to term it officially an agreement, not least because that would stir a negative response by the Republicans in Congress.

The U.S. initiative is based on a freeze in return for a release. Iran has committed not to enrich uranium above a level of 60 percent – that is, not to reach the 90-percent level at which nuclear arms can be manufactured. Washington, for its part, has withdrawn its opposition to the release of Iranian assets worth $20 billion in banks across several countries. Iran and Western countries will mutually release prisoners and kidnapping victims. These unofficial understandings have already taken effect, and it looks as though Iran has slowed down, if it hasn’t already stopped, enriching uranium to high levels. The compromise effort is being coordinated by Brett McGurk, the Biden administration’s National Security Council coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa.

Concurrently, the Americans sought to place Israel in a kind of bear hug. On the one hand, they are more generous when it comes to official publicity about joint military exercises, which imply joint attack capability against Iran (and it could be they are also willing to discuss this in greater detail in backrooms). On the other hand, their expectation is apparently for Israel not to take them by surprise in the form of an independent attack on Iran. More than a decade ago, the U.S. invested a major effort, both in collecting friendly intelligence and in moves that can be described as “soft influence,” to ensure that no such scenario came to pass. Since then, one basic fact has changed: The Biden administration trusts Netanyahu even less than the administration of Barack Obama did.