Gerard Colby: Thy Will Be Done

Gerald Colby with Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (1995, Harper Collins)

I've been reading a book by Gerard Colby "with" Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (1995). Consider this deep background, although the main effect so far (I'm almost 300 pages in) has been to remind me that the present age of unbridled hubris, not to mention imperialism, show by the US is not unprecedented: if anything, the US was even more cavalier in its efforts to topple foreign regimes and promote business favors as policy then than now. Also notable was the use of evangelism to attack native cultures, and the eagnerness of protestant missionaries to take part in imperialist activities. (Note the gathering storm of fundamentalist missionaries in Kuwait, preparing to unleash Jesus on the heathen muslims of Iraq. Note also that while US missionaries in Lebanon and Syria in the 19th century were responsible for much of the good will in the region that the US has subsequently wasted, that was largely because they were liberal protestants, and because they limited their proselytizing to christian Arabs.)

But what I want to register here is a quote from p. 274, on bigger cold war issues. This was from 1955, when Nelson Rockefeller was an advisor to President Eisenhower working on cold war strategy and "psychological warfare."

To prevent the Soviets' publicly owned and subsidized socialist enterprises from competing "unfairly" against privately owned profit-seeking enterprises, the arms race would offer "the prospect of inducing strains in the Soviet economy." There would be "the added virtue of offering the type of production competition [high technology, capital intensive] that is comparatively most costly for the USSR to match."

An arms race just might bankrupt the Soviet Union, or at least cripple its capacity to compete in world markets with Western private corporations. And an arms race was bound to curtail production of consumer goods, continuing consumer frustrations and fears that increased the strength of conservatives in the Soviet military; any plans by Krushchev to dismantle Stalin's garrison state and introduce democratic reforms would have to give way before the perceived threat of imminent nuclear war. The United States, on the other hand, could "afford to survive" through an arms race. To rally the nation behind its new arms race, the report called for a presidential initiative in "explaining to the people of the United States the gravity of the world situation."

The right wing likes to give Ronald Reagan credit for triumph over the Soviet Union (or the Evil Empire, as they liked to call it), but it's pretty clear that it was Mikhail Gorbachev who decided to call off the arms race, recognizing not only that the Soviet Union couldn't keep up, but that it was both draining resources that should be rededicated to improving everyday lives and that it was reinforcing the militarist security state that weighed so heavily on the freedom and welfare of the people. But this quote reminds us that Reaganism predated Reagan by thirty years, much as Reagan's Contras merely revived the CIA's shenanigans from the '50s -- the very acts that got us into Vietnam and Iran, among other disasters.

Anyone familiar with business planning will immediately recognize this formulation of the arms race as what's called a "barrier to entry." This is a standard strategy of rich and powerful corporations to deter competition by making it seem impossibly expensive to compete. In terms of arms, I think this has always been obvious, but what this quote reveals to me is that one reason for the arms race was to forestall and hamper potential Russian competition against US companies in non-miitary industries. When you think about it, Russia did have a potential advantage over the US for many categories of industrial goods, based on its low labor costs, broad education for skills development, and ability to marshall capital cheaply (e.g., they wouldn't have to pay much heed to the capitalists). When you're talking about selling goods to the third world, those advantages could be significant. But Rockefeller et al. realized that if the US has an economy 4-5 times the size of the Soviet Union, it could afford to waste 5% of that on an arms race that the Soviets couldn't possibly keep up with, even if it pushed the Soviets to spend 20% of their GDP. As we've clearly seen from the economic growth of Japan and Germany, even the US's arms spending has been a significant tax on economic growth and public welfare -- what happened to Russia from 1955 to 1989 was far more damaging.

posted 2003-04-07