This week's address by Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to the 35 member states on the agency's governing board highlighted the urgent need for Iran to allow the agency broader inspection powers. But it also highlighted the importance of continuing constructive dialogue amid the bellicose words of national leaders.

There is plenty to alienate Western countries on the one hand and Iran on the other. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats against Israel, the nation's fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie and current domestic violations of human rights are deplorable. But many in the West are ignorant of the depth of resentment, even among the most moderate Iranians, at Western foreign policy in the region. Particularly remembered are the 1953 overthrow by the United States and Britain of the elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh after he nationalized the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company, and the decades of despotic rule that ensued under the Shah.

Nevertheless, Iran's current hard-line leadership masks the county's rich veins of democracy, education and free thinking, which are more developed than those of most of its neighbours in the Middle East. Moreover, Iranian and US politics are both more diverse and pragmatic towards foreign policy than the respective presidents are. Détente is no longer inconceivable as the national interests — the driver of Realpolitik — of both converge, not least in Iraq.

But as tensions run high, academics on all sides can try and help defuse them. Some, in particular physicists, are already active in back-channel diplomacy, encouraging détente by opening up informal, person-to-person communications that bypass their stiff-necked leaders. The US National Academy of Sciences is also expanding scientific cooperation and dialogue with Iran. Such efforts are to be applauded.

A crucial imperative is to find a way out of the international crisis over Iran's nuclear programme. Academics have a role here, too. From historians and nuclear physicists to national academies, they can help to elevate the level of debate above that conveyed by Fox News or Iran's state television. They can explain the complex geopolitical realities that have led to the current escalation, but also inject much-needed scientific facts and objectivity into the debates about the purposes of Iran's nuclear efforts.

It is important to unpack the issues. Iran needs to come clean on any past military aims. But the key challenge is to deal with the here and now: regimes' past intents can be changed by forceful diplomacy. Many nuclear experts argue that the most important goal is for the international community to have confidence that Iran's current programme is not diverted to military ends. And so the priority is to persuade Iran to agree to the 1997 'additional protocol' to the IAEA's safeguards agreement. The protocol gives the agency extra powers, such as short-notice inspections of any site — not just of declared nuclear facilities — and so guards against the biggest worry: clandestine diversion of nuclear expertise.

Iran has not ratified the additional protocol, although it voluntarily allowed equivalent broad access from May 2004 to January 2006. But after United Nations resolutions required it to suspend uranium enrichment, Iran stopped its extended cooperation with the IAEA, and reaped popular domestic support in the process by portraying the actions as foreign threats to their right to nuclear energy.

Earlier this week the United Nations Security Council agreed to further sanctions against Iran in the hope of forcing a suspension of enrichment. Such an aim is indeed desirable for many reasons, but an insistence that there can be no negotiations until Iran ceases enrichment is futile and counterproductive. A negotiated solution would strengthen the hand of reformers in Iran, because it would dilute Ahmadinejad's ability to wield external threats and divert domestic attention from his dire human-rights and economic record.

Many of Iran's democratic forces have their roots in a vibrant scientific community, which too often has been subjected to humiliating visa refusals and actively or passively ostracized by colleagues elsewhere. An experiment for Iranian and US scientists: follow the example of fellow researchers, find a counterpart in your field, and connect with them.