That framing contrasts with the rhetorical question he posed at the May summit of whether the two countries could avoid the Thucydides Trap. The Thucydides Trap, popularized by Harvard professor Graham Allison in the early 2010s, refers to how tensions between a rising and ruling power have historically often resulted in a war.
Thucydides was an Athenian general in ancient Greece. His historical record of the Peloponnesian War described how Athens’ rapid rise in power alarmed Sparta and made war between the two city-states inevitable.