"There is no need for Europe to go to war with China – cold or hot – to protect American hegemony," said a historian as NATO's chief hinted at the EU being drawn into a new Cold War between the U.S. and China.

Jens Stoltenberg, the general secretary of NATO, told the Financial Times that the bloc has set its sights on China after decades of sparring with the Soviet Union and Russia, stressing that "there is a new foe in town."

Acknowledging NATO was specifically built to "keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down," Tarik Cyril Amar, a professor of Soviet, Russia, Ukraine and Cold War History at Columbia University, said: "A pact named the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was never meant to take care of the Pacific or deal with China."

Further, Amar wrote that "What Europe needs is to stay out of America's new Cold War against China," in his article titled NATO's dodgy geography: US-led bloc's insistence on moving on from Russia to confront China will put West on dangerous new ground published on RT (formerly Russia Today) on October 22.  

Noting that China is now the EU's single biggest trading partner and the two sides have powerful common interests, he said, "There's nothing wrong with not always being friends between Brussels and Beijing but it would be idiotic to become enemies or anything less than partners."  

He further added that Europe is in a position to profit from China's rise, so it is not at all in the continent's interest to join Washington in a fight for America's hegemony.