China will always be our biggest threat. AI is making this clear.

When speaking to the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence in June, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman urged Chinese and Western officials and tech leaders to collaborate in “mitigating” the dangers that unregulated AI development could pose to humanity.

“China has some of the best AI talent in the world. ... Given the difficulties in solving alignment for advanced AI systems, this requires the best minds from around the world,” Altman said.

On one hand, given the rising geopolitical and economic tensions between the U.S. and China, Altman’s desire to collaborate with his country’s most significant foreign adversary is surprising. On the other, considering his well-documented anxieties over potential existential threats AI presents to humanity, it isn’t. It appears that Altman is simply trying to appeal to collective concerns about humanity, but therein lies the issue: He relies on a Western understanding of human nature to ingratiate his cause with explicit adversaries of Western thought.

Ruling-class conventional wisdom tells us that the keys to understanding human civilization and avoiding conflict can be found in parsing complicated macroeconomic models and various theories of diplomatic relations. Frankly, this is bunk. Despite unprecedented economic and diplomatic interdependence, neither economics nor ideology provides us with the necessary tools to understand our adversaries in the 21st century. The first principles civilizations remain committed to are the cultural precepts informing their understanding of human existence that differentiate them from other civilizations. Historically, civilizations with dissimilar cultures are destined for conflict of some kind.

In his 1993 essay “The Clash of Civilizations?” political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote, “[The] differences among civilizations are not only real; they are basic. Civilizations are differentiated from each other by history, language, culture, tradition and, most important, religion. The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear. They are far more fundamental than differences among political ideologies and political regimes.”

In brief, civilizational differences in culture are fundamental aspects of human existence that inform our perspectives, whereas ideology and economic factors are subject to rapid change.

Upon returning to England after failing to initiate trade relations with China in 1793, George Macartney delivered a letter to King George III from Emperor Qianlong in which Qianlong expressed that Chinese and British cultures were simply incompatible — the foundational principles of each would make meaningful exchange impossible.

The emperor wrote: “If you assert that your reverence for Our Celestial dynasty fills you with a desire to acquire our civilisation, our ceremonies and code of laws differ so completely from your own that, even if your Envoy were able to acquire the rudiments of our civilisation, you could not possibly transplant our manners and customs to your alien soil. Therefore, however adept the Envoy might become, nothing would be gained thereby.”

The British and Chinese cultural distinctions, the underlying ethos of Western and Confucian civilizations, led the emperor to reject a potentially mutually beneficial relationship. He was convinced they could not meaningfully collaborate because they simply valued different things and perceived themselves to be too different.

In the 21st century, as large-scale conflicts predicated primarily upon things like ideology have faded and, in the case of fiefdom, generally ceased to exist, cultural conflicts remain. A civilizational conflict informed by cultural distinctions is at the heart of every significant contemporary issue — territorial disputes, trade disagreements, inclusion in global banking systems, etc. Take, for instance, the recent attack on Israel by Hamas: The Jewish state’s very existence is antithetical to the cultural priorities of political Islam.

It’s no different with the U.S. and China.

American benevolence in trade with China hasn’t stopped China from stealing billions of dollars in intellectual property, chipping away at our national security apparatus, or committing human rights atrocities. Diplomatic pressures have no effect on preventing these actions, either.

The two most powerful countries — one convinced of its responsibility to globally evangelize on behalf of Western values and the other perceiving itself to occupy the space between the heavens and the earth — hail from diametrically opposed civilizational traditions. They cannot meaningfully collaborate in ways that are truly sustainable because their civilizational visions are incompatible.

While analyzing American and Chinese cultural norms and approaches to governance in 2017, Graham Allison, author of "Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?" further juxtaposed these contradictory civilizational visions. America’s core value is freedom; China’s is order. The American exemplar is a missionary; the Chinese exemplar is inimitable. America seeks immediate solutions; China delays gratification. America pursues societal change through invention; China pursues it through a process of cultural restoration and evolution. American foreign policy relies on cooperative international order; China’s relies on harmonious hierarchy in which its rivals understand they are ultimately subservient.

Writing for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center in 2015, former Australian PM Kevin Rudd said, “China has also generated a self-referential body of philosophical thought and way of thinking that does not readily yield to the epistemological demands and intellectual taxonomies of the Western academy. And within this philosophical system, Confucianism in its various forms lies at the core.” The Chinese and American visions for the future are simply incompatible. China perceives its adversaries as perpetually uncivilized and “barbaric,” while the United States insists on an open civilization in which everyone operates in good faith.

China is our greatest geopolitical adversary and is explicitly working to undermine the U.S. both at home and abroad. But even if we ignore rising tensions between the U.S. and China and what currently appears to be an inevitable clash, it is naive to assume we could mutually benefit from collaborating on something as existential as artificial intelligence.

AI has the power not just to reshape the global economy but to redefine humanity’s very relationship with nature and nature’s God. Any relationship the U.S. and tech leaders pursue abroad, pertaining to its regulation and development, must be with those who are civilizationally aligned.