news - web sites ) is to prepare for battle well beyond its own borders, ready to carry war to those who, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned Tuesday, may now target Europe after strikes on New York and Washington.
Ministers of the 19-nation bloc met in Brussels and agreed to review defense planning on both sides of the North Atlantic in light of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
Secretary-General George Robertson called on them to face up to the cost of revamping an organization created in the Cold War to fight major land battles in Europe and which has been left largely on the sidelines as Washington has called on individual allies for limited help in its military campaign in Afghanistan ( news - web sites ).
"We agreed to increase the proportion of forces that can be deployed and sustained in operations far beyond Alliance territory," Robertson told a news conference.
"Our security environment must now be seen in a fundamentally different -- and considerably darker -- light."
Until now, the farthest NATO troops have been deployed has been just beyond Alliance frontiers, in the Balkans.
Rumsfeld used the occasion to defend the U.S. decision to abandon the Cold War-era Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in the interests of creating flexible defenses against the sort of unpredictable new threats seen in September.
To underline a common determination not to let differences over the missile treaty cloud better ties with NATO's old adversary, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov was also in Brussels for talks.
Within hours of arriving in Brussels Monday, Rumsfeld and Ivanov had agreed that bilateral technical talks would begin in January to plan details of joint and deep nuclear arms cuts.
Tuesday, Ivanov promised cooperation against terrorism and won assurances of a much broader, closer relationship with NATO, although with no Russian veto over Alliance decisions.
Rumsfeld also called for sharp cuts in NATO troop numbers in Bosnia in what diplomats said appeared to be an effort to free up American forces for deployment elsewhere.

Warning of "tumultuous decades ahead," Rumsfeld said, "The only way to deal with a terrorist network that is global is to go after it where it is."
"As we look at the devastation they unleashed in the United States, contemplate the destruction they could wreak in New York, or London, or Paris, of Berlin with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons."