New START is a disarmament treaty that is almost irrelevant as a step towards nonproliferation, because while the U.S. and Russia have 95% of the world’s nuclear weapons between them, their arsenals are reasonably secure. Reducing them is not going to end the Iranian nuclear program, stop the escalation on the Korean peninsula or prevent Pakistan from being overrun by the TTP.

What it is going to do, however, is create the basis for the next era in U.S.-Russia relations, burying the last hangovers of the Cold War (which is in many ways what the treaty is about) to acknowledge that as the competition for economic resources and influence in Central and South Asia heats up, Moscow and Washington will increasingly find themselves on the same side.

Turkey has historically seen itself, and been resented by its former colonies, as a European power. After trying repeatedly to join the European Union, and failing, Turkey has spent the last few years in a painful process of reinvention, electing a conservative Islamist government and making overtures to its eastward neighbors. This theocratic turn is hardly in the interest of Turkey’s NATO allies. Luckily, it has had only limited success.

Now, one NATO ally asks Turkey to grant access to its shores to deploy missile systems against a Middle Eastern neighbor, and thereby to trade in any hard-earned goodwill in the region and risk its own security. Given its history, Turkey seems ill-suited to the region’s club of theocracies; but it is unfair to ask it to trade it this tenuous sense of belonging after summarily denying its more natural place in Europe. Moreover, as a NATO ally, Turkey has treaty rights to better protection than to be asked to play a dangerous and antagonistic role towards its own neighbors on behalf of a community to which it has only partial access.