Thucydides Trap
The pattern, drawn from Thucydides's account of Athens and Sparta, in which a rising power's growth alarms an established power enough to make war between them more likely — Thucydides's own diagnosis of the Peloponnesian War's cause: 'the growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.' Used in modern international relations as a shorthand for structural tension between a rising and a status-quo great power.