“I’ll give you these concessions, but then I’m going to shoot you.”

Three Bush Foreign-Policy Hypotheses
I won’t undertake to substantiate these, just to offer them as hypotheses.
1. We (i.e., the Bush administration) are refusing talks with Syria and Iran, because we are afraid the talks would succeed.
2. We are afraid of the talks succeeding, because we’d have to renounce regime-change. (It is diplomatically untenable to say, “I’ll give you these concessions, but then I’m going to shoot you.”).
3. We won’t renounce regime-change, because being the only remaining superpower would be pointless if we couldn’t even threaten uncooperative governments.