So, here we are again. The big men in the expensive suits are talking. They sat up all night. They drank their fancy coffee. They looked at maps. Russian President Vladimir Putin had a sleepover with Donald Trump’s special team. They call them "envoys." That is just a fancy word for guys who carry messages because the boss is too busy or too important to do it himself. The news reports say they had "marathon overnight talks." That makes it sound like hard work. It makes it sound like a sport. It is not a sport. It is just a bunch of rich guys sitting in a warm room deciding who gets to keep what, while people outside in the mud are freezing.

The Kremlin came out the next morning and told us what this is really about. They did not use big words about freedom or justice. They did not talk about saving lives. They kept it simple. They said a settlement depends on "territory." Let’s break that down for a second. "Territory." It sounds clean. It sounds like a piece of a board game. It is not clean. It is dirt. It is land where people live. It is land where people’s houses used to be before they got blown up. Putin is saying, very simply, "I keep what I took." It is like a robber breaking into your house, stealing your television, and then telling the police he will only leave if he gets to keep the remote control, too.

And Trump’s guys? They are there to make a deal. We all know Trump loves a deal. He thinks everything in the world is just a business contract that went bad. He thinks you can fix a war the same way you fix a bad hotel construction project. You just walk in, yell a little bit, shake hands, and declare victory. But this is not a hotel. This is a country. The problem is that Trump’s team wants a headline that says "Peace." They want to go home and say they fixed it. They want the credit. Putin knows this. He knows that if he just waits long enough, the other side will get bored and give him what he wants just to make the noise stop.

Think about the word "envoys" for a minute. These are people who are not the President, but they speak for him. They flew all the way to Russia to sit at a long table. Why did it take all night? What were they talking about at 3:00 AM? Were they ordering pizza? Were they telling ghost stories? No. They were looking for a way to make giving up sound like winning. That takes a lot of time. You have to find just the right words to tell the world that you are letting a big country take a bite out of a small country. You have to dress it up. You have to put a bow on it.

The cynical part—the part that really makes you sick—is that everyone acts like this is new. It is not new. Big countries have been trading little countries like baseball cards for thousands of years. It is a game to them. They look at a map and they draw a line with a pen. "This side is yours, this side is mine." They do not care about the people living on the line. The people are just ants to them. If you live on the wrong side of the new line, too bad for you. You are now part of the deal.

The Left will scream that this is awful. They will say we are selling out. They are right, of course. We are selling out. But let’s be honest: they didn’t stop it either. They just made longer speeches while it happened. The Right will cheer. They will say this is genius. They will say this brings peace. They are lying. It brings quiet, not peace. Quiet is just what happens while you reload your gun for the next time. There is no honor here. There are just two groups of powerful people figuring out how to carve up the turkey.

So, the Kremlin says it hinges on territory. Of course it does. It always does. It is always about who owns the dirt. We act like we are civilized. We have smartphones and electric cars and the internet. But at the end of the day, we are just cavemen with better suits, hitting each other over the head for a bigger piece of the cave. Trump’s envoys can talk all night. Putin can talk all night. But nothing really changes. The strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must. And the rest of us just watch it on the news and pretend to be shocked.