On the latest episode of FP Live, I invited Tooze to discuss his essay further. Tooze is a professor at Columbia University and also a co-host of FP’s weekly economics podcast, Ones and Tooze. Subscribers can watch our full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

In Foreign Policy’s Fall 2025 print issue , economic historian Adam Tooze makes the case that with hindsight, the global development agenda of the last few decades seems like “an effort to craft a world organized around a spreadsheet of universal values rather than politics.” China’s success in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, he argues, “has not fostered greater trust or agreement on a rules-based order. Instead, it has triggered a new cold war.”

In Foreign Policy’s Fall 2025 print issue, economic historian Adam Tooze makes the case that with hindsight, the global development agenda of the last few decades seems like “an effort to craft a world organized around a spreadsheet of universal values rather than politics.” China’s success in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, he argues, “has not fostered greater trust or agreement on a rules-based order. Instead, it has triggered a new cold war.”

On the latest episode of FP Live, I invited Tooze to discuss his essay further. Tooze is a professor at Columbia University and also a co-host of FP’s weekly economics podcast, Ones and Tooze. Subscribers can watch our full discussion on the video box atop this page or download the FP Live podcast. What follows here is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: Let’s talk about your essay. You begin by describing how strange it is that the United States denounced the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals [SDGs] this year. The larger point you get to is quite profound: This isn’t just about the Trump administration—or even the United States. The collective West talked a big game about development as a human right, but it wasn’t prepared for the likes of, say, Ethiopia or Nigeria to reach even Turkish levels of GDP per capita.

Adam Tooze: This essay is an exercise in using the Trump moment not just to collapse into a nervous heap but to actually reflect on the 10th anniversary of both the SDGs and the Paris Agreement on climate—to try to decipher it and understand it for what it was.

I wanted to pick away at that moment in 2015, which in retrospect appears weird, to put it crudely. At least pro forma, all of the governments of the world agreed on two very basic objectives. One was a truly comprehensive package of transformative improvements to human conditions and life. The other was a determination to stabilize the climate on a timeline. Literally every government in the world signed up, and when that happens, you have to wonder what was going on. We need to ask historically how that came about.

At the time, those developmental goals were sold as the opening of a new era.