As is perhaps fitting for a "capitalist" society, Americans tend to address national security issues in monetary terms. In the early 1950s, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles counseled that "the Soviet Communists are planning what they call 'an entire historical era,' and we should do the same. They seek, through many types of maneuvers, gradually to divide and weaken the free nations by overextending them in efforts which, as Lenin put it, are 'beyond their Strength, so that they come to practical bankruptcy.'"