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
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