From Four Nodes of History: The Human Rights Challenge in the Philippine Security Sector This was a major cause of wars that eventually led to two world wars. This became known as the Monroe Doctrine, which became a foreign policy on December 2, 1823. 6. The third and final phase was the Mahan Doctrine, a doctrine for world dominance in commerce and military hegemony. How did the United States solve the problem of overseas markets and raw materials to stave off a crisis of overproduction? As industrialization progressed, the United States started to expand its territories beyond the 13 original states that declared independence from Britain. They took away the lands of the native Indian nations through genocide, annexed and/ or bought the territories in North America that were occupied by Spain, France and Mexico. They bought Alaska from Russia. These land purchases were necessary in order to secure them permanently on a legal basis. The second phase was the control of the whole Northern, Central and Southern America which had acquired independence through libertarian revolutions. The US warned all European nations that those who tried to take these nations would be interpreted as a declaration of war on the United States of America. They justified this move with the slogan, “America for the Americans”, a policy that meant that these nations were the economic backyard of the United States. 46 The Mahan Doctrine was translated into an operational plan which was ironed out even before the Spanish-American War had occurred. The power to force other nations to open their markets for American goods, extract raw materials, and protect American commercial ships (which also indirectly implied the power to embargo and stop the free flow of commercial ships of other nations) could be better achieved by projecting naval power from their strategically positioned naval bases world-wide. It was along this thinking that many of its adherents successfully pushed the United States to build a powerful navy. 7. How did Germany and Japan deal with the problem of overproduction? Germany and Japan, like the US, did not have the advantage of former European empires that had extensive territories to absorb their industrial commodities. They sought markets through a militarist policy which became the basis