True, more a matter of the intelligence resulting in dominance than the reverse. I think you could define dominant as, basically, top of the food chain - able to kill any other animal it wishes to, and able to defend itself from all others. It would certainly be possible to be dominant without high intelligence, but it seems unlikely it would be possible to be dominant over a competitor that has a significant intelligence advantage, assuming the competitor survives long enough to exploit it.

But the question is, does that mean that if such an evolutionary path is possible in a given environment, it will always eventually occur? My guess would be yes, but I'm certainly not 100% confident. ('Eventually' meaning, say, within a hundred million years. Presumably given infinite time, everything possible would occur, so that's not really interesting.)