Reykjavik, Iceland ? Turning Russia into an ally of the same Western military alliance that had confronted it for decades, NATO leaders on Tuesday approved a landmark cooperation agreement that will treat Moscow as an equal partner on a range of security issues.

One day after the United States and Russia closed a deal to dramatically slash their nuclear arsenals, Russia was welcomed as a peer of the 19-member club of Western democracies that aim to guarantee the security and stability of Europe and North America.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addresses the media during the NATO foreign ministers meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland.

The agreement represents “the funeral of the Cold War,” British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said.

“It marks a profound, historical change,” Straw added. “With this, Russia comes out of the cold as a partner, ally and friend of NATO.”

Under the terms of the new NATO-Russia Council, Moscow will deliberate with NATO member states as an equal on issues such as terrorism, crisis management, weapons proliferation and peacekeeping operations. Fundamental decisions relating to Western security, however, still will be taken without Russian participation.

The deal also soothes Russia’s opposition to NATO’s imminent expansion, which is likely to include the three Baltic nations and thus would bring the alliance right up to Russia’s border. Russia says NATO expansion is unnecessary but has chosen not to contest what it sees an inevitable decision.

“The creation today of the Russia-NATO joint council is an important event in ensuring international stability,” Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said.

The new arrangement, approved by NATO foreign ministers at their meeting in the Icelandic capital and due to be signed by heads of government from NATO countries and Russia on May 28, replaces a less-effective NATO-Russia joint panel formed five years ago that the Russians had long criticized as mere window-dressing.

The accord with Russia represents a concrete victory for NATO as member countries grapple with vexing new 21st century threats that were never imagined when the Cold War-era defensive alliance was formed.

“The trans-Atlantic relationship faces a paradox,” Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said earlier this month. “We have the most successful alliance ever created, but it is, or seems to be, marginal or even irrelevant when it comes to dealing with the most urgent issues of the day.”

Foremost among those issues is the danger posed by terrorists who can strike seemingly at will from havens around the globe and even from within Western democracies, as the Sept. 11 attacks showed.

“Security threats can no longer be measured in fleets of warships, tanks or airplanes,” Lord George Robinson, the NATO secretary general, told the foreign ministers at the opening of their two-day meeting. “Deadly attacks are no longer launched only by governments. And they can strike utterly without warning.”

But NATO is challenged from within as well.

American military capabilities, such as precision-guided smart weapons and sophisticated coordination between troops on the ground and strike pilots overhead, now far outstrip the ability of most NATO allies to keep pace.

Terrorist threats change strategies

“We want to have allies who can fight with us side-by-side in the future,” a senior State Department official said last week. “The kinds of capabilities we needed to defend members for 50 years are not necessarily what we need now.”

The NATO foreign ministers agreed that European member states must spend more both on military technology and mobility, particularly the ability to quickly airlift troops and equipment wherever they are needed.

The international origins of terrorists threats, Robertson said, mean that NATO member states can no longer assume their battles will be confined to Europe or North America.

For their part, European allies grumble that the United States is too willing to take unilateral military action, such as in Afghanistan, and leave them to “clean up after the parade,” as Biden put it.

‘Robust’ expansion planned

There is also the question of NATO’s expansion and whether the eastern European countries being considered for membership are sufficiently stable and democratic enough to merit invitations. NATO is currently vetting 10 applicant nations Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, Albania and Croatia with decisions due to be made before the next NATO summit in Prague in November. NATO officials have steadfastly refused to hint how many new members will be invited to join, repeating only that the expansion will be “robust.”

“The question is, are they going to be stable, strong democracies?” said the senior State Department official. “They all have issues of corruption, for example, which is so corrosive to democracy. We don’t expect them to be perfect, but we expect commitment, progress and the belief that they are not in danger of a reversal.”

The NATO sessions here were taking place not far from the wooden Icelandic guesthouse made famous in 1986, when U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met for talks that ultimately proved to be the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, and the Cold War.

Secretary of State Colin Powell said he wasn’t sure what to call the new era of relations between Russia and the United States.

“We haven’t looked for a neon sign to put over the relationship,” he said at a joint press conference with Ivanov. “But clearly a strong friendship and partnership is being forged between Russia and the United States, and between Russia and the West in general. We don’t yet quite have a cliche to capture this all.”

Ivanov, too, declined to label the new bilateral relationship, but he described Russia’s goal: “We want them to be partnership relations, constructive relations and predictable relations.”

However the transformation of relations is described, Powell said, it is so profound that the conflicts between Russia and the United States are now expressed in terms of chickens, rather than missiles.

“I am more worried about chickens going back and forth than missiles going back and forth,” Powell said, in reference to an ongoing trade dispute over U.S. poultry exports to Russia. “This is good. It is much better to worry about these kinds of exchanges than the kinds of exchanges I used to worry about.”