President Obama’s new Administration moved decisively to improve relations with Russia and Iran yesterday when Hillary Clinton steered Nato towards a resumption of formal ties with Moscow and invited Tehran to share the re-building of Afghanistan.

Mrs Clinton used her first Nato meeting as Secretary of State to push for a regional summit on Afghanistan to which she publicly invited Iran in a palpable demonstration of Mr Obama’s inaugural pledge to “extend a hand” to hostile powers.

In a sign of the goodwill felt towards the new US Administration, she also found that a series of Nato members with strong reservations about reviving talks with Russia were keen to follow her call for dialogue with the Kremlin.

Mrs Clinton’s progress on these two fronts should help to create a positive atmosphere for Mr Obama’s visit to Nato and the EU next month. He is due to arrive in London on April 1 for the G20 summit, one day after the proposed conference on Afghanistan.

“If we move forward with such a meeting, it is expected that Iran would be invited as a neighbour of Afghanistan,” said Mrs Clinton, adding that the meeting should extend beyond Nato members to donors and neighbours. Iran failed to send its Foreign Minister to a similar conference in Paris in December.

Russia immediately welcomed the re-opening of the Nato-Russia Council, the formal body for talks at ministerial and ambassador level, which was suspended afer its incursion into Georgia last year.

“This decision is a step in the right direction,” Russia’s RIA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

The decision gave Mrs Clinton the ideal platform for talks tomorrow in Geneva with Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister.

Mrs Clinton pledged to talk tough with Mr Lavrov. “We will also raise with Russia, their continuing discussions with Iran about selling longer-range missiles which we think are a threat to Russia as well as to Europe and neighbours in the region,” she said.

Mr Obama is keen to bring Russia in from the cold and invite its help with a number of American strategic goals, not least restraining Iran, fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan and reducing nuclear weapons.

Mrs Clinton said that she would pursue dialogue “with our eyes wide open” after concerns about Russian motives. This also echoed President Bush’s remark after first meeting the then President Putin - that he looked into his eyes and found a man he could trust - which ended up sounding naive.

Mrs Clinton added that the door to Nato membership must be kept open for the former Soviet countries Georgia and Ukraine, a move strongly opposed by Moscow.

Details of a long letter from Mr Obama to President Medvedev were leaked this week which suggested that the US was prepared to sacrifice its proposed missile defence programme in eastern Europe to gain Russian support on Iran. But in contrast to the neutral line followed by the Obama Administration, which is officially reviewing missile defence, Mrs Clinton gave a staunch defence of it today, calling the Czechs and Poles visionary for offering to take part.

Only Lithuania held out against Mrs Clinton’s call to renew Nato relations with Moscow, but dropped its objections in return for a re-statement of the alliance’s many areas of disagreement with Russia.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said that reviving formal Nato-Russia ties now was the way to deal directly with concerns.“We want to engage with Russia to state very clearly the areas where there is common interest and also areas of disagreement,” said Mr Miliband.

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