America’s newly-installed secretary of state is to skip his first Nato meeting, it has been announced, and will instead greet the president of China and then travel to Russia.

The decision, likely celebrated in Moscow, has been greeted with surprise and anger from some in the United States.

Eliot Engel, the senior Democrat on the house foreign affairs committee, said that Mr Tillerson was making “grave error” by missing his first Brussels talks.

"Donald Trump's administration is making a grave error that will shake the confidence of America's most important alliance and feed the concern that this administration simply too cozy with Vladimir Putin," he said.

"I cannot fathom why the administration would pursue this course except to signal a change in American foreign policy that draws our country away from western democracy's most important institutions and aligns the United States more closely with the autocratic regime in the Kremlin."

A former US official echoed the view.

"It feeds this narrative that somehow the Trump administration is playing footsie with Russia," he said.

"You don’t want to do your early business with the world's great autocrats. You want to start with the great democracies, and Nato is the security instrument of the transatlantic group of great democracies.”

