KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images

This week, an elite team of Iranians landed in Utah and began training exercises. Yet the act sparked no alarm. Why?

The 25 men are members of the Iranian national basketball team, invited to participate in the NBA summer league in Utah as they prepare for their first Olympics in 60 years. Meanwhile, the 18-year old captain of the Iranian junior national team has been training in Texas, hoping to become the first of his countrymen to play college hoops in the United States.

Despite the bluster and bellicose rhetoric on both sides, this basketball diplomacy is one of several recent signs of greater U.S. engagement with Tehran. U.S. Undersecretary of State William J. Burns, who is heading to Geneva for international talks with Iran this weekend, told Congress last week that the athletic outreach, which includes hosting the Iranian table tennis and soccer teams, is part of a broader effort to repair relations with the Iranian people:

Over the long-term, we hope to build connections among our people through educational, cultural, and other exchanges which can overcome 30 years of estrangement that has severed links between our societies.

Hopefully, basketball is just the beginning. These types of arrangements don't get the same types of headlines as sanctions or cigarettes, but they're an important piece of the diplomatic puzzle. And after all, there's really nothing for the United States to lose -- other than perhaps, embarassingly, a basketball game.