The Allies had to trade independence for a number of Eastern European states (based on plebiscites and religious and linguistic differences) in exchange for the US bothering to hold a draft to send Americans of Austro-Hungarian descent to fight Germans.
The German idea that they could depend on a fifth column of Germans in the US was, of course, total BS ~ most of those Germans were here simply because Germany provided them with nothing, and, to top it of, our earliest German immigrants ~ starting in the late 1600s, had come here as penniless refugees courtesy of the King of England ~ who, of course, was German himself.
Sorry, the citizenry here just never listen much to the leadership elites of Europe ~ never have ~ but they don't care to kill their cousins either. The threat wasn't that the US would turn on the Brits, but that we wouldn't stay neutral ~ none of which would have made any difference when the Spanish flu hit the battlefield. That war disappeared in days.
But, let me put it to you this way ~ nations don't have friends, they only have interests. it was not in the American interest to participate in WWI ~ no one there was a threat to us.
“the Ottoman Empire was an old American ally since the Revolution.”
Really, because your ignorance of history is showing again.
While there were Germans in America as colonists, the British enlisted the the Germans as mercenaries and were an item in the Declaration of Independence: “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.”
Sorry but Germany wasn’t a friend during that time and they even refused to acknowledge America as a nation until 1783 when we signed the Treaty of Paris.
I've always had an interest in WWI (with its being so obscured by the war following) and am not at all opposed to a little revisionism. However, there were several run-ins with Germany in the Pacific (I believe about the time of the Spanish-American War), which led the German military to contemplate an invasion of Boston. This doesn't mean that Germany intended to attack the United States. It means they were anticipating trouble with the US and considered this plan as one way to respond to it.
This is no different to the US preparing for war with Japan since the end of the Russo-Japanese War, long before Japan became hostile to America.