Harry Collings Misinterpreting The Monroe Doctrine

President William McKinley was deeply ambivalent about the war against Spain. To justify the use of weapons in the far Pacific, for the occasion he sacrificed his pacifist tendencies in the name of national interest and evoked the injustice done to the Filipino people and the moral duty that requires the United States to go to the rescue. At the end of the Spanish-American war, after originally declaring that it would "be criminal aggression" for the United States to annex the archipelago, he reversed himself, partly out of threat that another power would seize the Philippines , partly because of the pressure of the public opinion.
This initiative is not at all a surprise. In Michael Hunt’s Pacific Historical Review, he claims that American policies before the 1890s were isolationist in nature. This
closure to the international affairs was inevitable because of internal problems as the civil war and the expansion towards the West. However, once unified and compacted internally, they became increasingly involved in world affairs, especially in the former Spanish colonies, to secure and promote Western trades. The age of Imperialism brought back the idea “terra est potest” and the whole world was deeply changed because of it. Industry and trade are two of the prevalent stimuli. On one hand, the problem of overproduction was becoming alarming. In 1898, Senator Albert Beveridge declared that an expansion of markets was absolutely necessary, as "American factories are making more than the American people can use; than they can consume." If the United States could annex territories with great economic potential, they were granted access to the trade and capital of those. The Chinese market, which has more than 400 million potential consumers, feeds the "dreams" of the industrialists. Pressure groups such as the American China Development Company suggest that this "miracle outlet" could make American factories run full force for decades. However, the crux of the problem lies elsewhere: American exceptionalism. An increasing number of Americans think that their country is called to play a fundamental role in the history of humanity and that it is their duty to occupy the place they deserve in the world. American expansionism finds its moral justification in the responsibility of bringing freedom, democracy, and progress to other peoples. As the "Washington Post" summarized in evocative terms in 1898: "A new feeling seems to dwell within us: the awareness of our own strength. And with it, a new appetite: the desire to demonstrate it”. Theodore Roosevelt, assistant secretary of the Navy in the McKinley administration, claimed that he rejected imperialism, but he embraced the near-identical doctrine of expansionism, till one point claiming, "I should welcome almost any war". Roosevelt's interest in the Spanish former colonies comes to be justified by the Monroe Doctrine or the total and unconditional opening of markets and trade routes, in the name of free competition. Firstly, the U.S. military forces could not compare with those of the great European powers until WWI. Secondly, the American people could never have accepted to become a colonizing power, as a former colony and first long-standing democratic republic. In “The Provinciality of American Empire: ‘Liberal Exceptionalism’ and U.S. Colonial Rule, 1898-1912” by Julian Go, he explains that the United States was an empire, however, most citizens in the US refused to think to their country as an empire. Actually, also S.C. Miller says that the public's sense of innocence is about Realpolitik impairs popular recognition of U.S. imperial conduct, leading to policies of exerting influence via other means, including governing other countries via surrogates or puppet regimes.
These are the reasons why the Philippines’ case is peculiar.
The U.S. acquisition of territories was different according to the characteristics of the region but, while the European nations tended to control the colonies directly, the American foreign policies tended to follow the Monroe doctrine. The ultimate purpose was (and still is) ensuring the “open door”. In Harry Collings’ Misinterpreting the Monroe Doctrine, Collings explains that the Monroe Doctrine was truly believed by American people. Their foreign policy was based on the attempt to keep the trades open and favor free competition. To establish their commercial supremacy, they did not dislocate the forces great military forces, as the Europeans, far from it. They usually controlled the economy through the "dollar policy", by establishing branches of American banks in the colonized country in such a way as to make it depend on the American currency and export of the product. At the same time, they secured the area through military bases, so much so that Chalmers Johnson called them "the American version of the colonies". Physical occupation and annexation were indeed not necessary. Then why the
Philippines?
Frank Ninkovich explains that the United States used imperialism in the Philippines just for the sake of taking land or “pure imperialism”. In the wake of the other powers, even the United States expands territorially beyond its borders, with all the difficulties that this entails. Indeed, after having denied the promised independence to the Filipinos, American soldiers became from liberators invaders. In February 1899 the rebels, led by the nationalist Emilio Aguinaldo, rose up and a fierce guerrilla begins. In order to cut off the independence movement, the Americans adopted all forms of reprisal against the population: from the destruction of crops, the mass segregation of the population to concentration camps (where Filipinos were decayed by starvation and disease), to indiscriminate shooting of civilians as an act of mere reprisal for American casualties.