katchen
Banned
It would take a combination of a United States Congress and Administration that takes Alfred Thayer Mahan's advice on the importance of seapower to heart a lot sooner than IOTL (1898) and builds the Great White Fleet a lot earlier, say, during the Second Cleveland Administration, along with John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil discovering oil in Hasa, and Basra Vilayets--and the Ottomans standing in the way of exploiting that oil. That, which is admittedly more like a 20th Century combination of events would be what it would take to get the US embroiled in a war with the Ottoman Empire.