While expansion into the developing nations was an end in itself for U.S. companies, it was a means to an end for U.S. policymakers, who were less interested in economic investment per se than in what it brought. Investment and economic growth tended to mean stable political systems in the developing nations, a growing middle class that would be the bastion of stability, and, therefore, the greater ability of these countries to resist communism, which was the main (and often virtually only) U.S. foreign policy preoccupation during these decades. In this way investment by private U.S. companies in the developing nations and U.S foreign-policy interests went hand-in-hand. U.S. private companies saw these new areas as future sources of profit, while the U.S. government tended to see private investment as assisting in the larger foreign-policy goal of promoting stability and anti-communism.