I'm not a big Harry Turtledove fan (or even a critic), but he is the obvious choice to write the novel. 
Presumably if the U.S. never had controlled the Philippines, we would have been spared McKinley's rumination that "there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them...." And presumably, as you say, the economic motives for some form of imperialism would have remained; how soon and how forcefully the U.S. could act on them would depend in part on how badly it lost the war.
Hmm. I'm inclined to think not much difference in the long run, but I agree that it's impossible to say. To the extent that white man's burden was a driving motive for U.S. imperialism rather than essentially a pretext, losing the Spanish-American War might have gone far to discredit it. (Even winning the Spanish-American War went pretty far to discredit it....)
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