I've often thought the same thing. There wasn't anything about the Central Powers that made them uniquely bad at the time of the Great War, no great principle was at stake --- this was much more an imperial shoving match than a contest between freedom and authoritarianism. We basically dared the Germans to sink our civilian maritime traffic by sending arms to the U.K., and we had picked sides long before the Zimmermann telegram -- it's no wonder the Germans wanted Mexico to start a war with us.

Who's to say what might have happened if we'd stayed out of it. The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires almost certainly would have collapsed anyway. I suspect an exhausted Germany, with the Eastern front pacified and a stalemate on the Western front, would eventually have sued for peace with an equally exhausted France and Britain.