Indeed, our Earth's Westphalian concept of sovereign states is the main thing propping up Somalia and North Korea. There was a time when any state that failed that badly would be casually conquered by a more successful neighbor.

I have to disagree here. First of all, North Korea has the world's third largest army. Any state that tried to conquer it would have its hands full. Additionally, counterinsurgency warfare has become damn hard these days - consider the Soviet failure in Afghanistan during the 1980s. As Stalin observed, it takes a generation and a half to pacify a country and convert it to your ideology by force.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, conquering poorly defended land isn't profitable any more; some time around World War I, conquest became far more trouble than it's worth. Nobody wants Somalia, even if the rest of the world would be okay with someone marching an army into it. It's just not worth anything. The British Empire, a more modern example of conquest for profit, never occupied Afghanistan. It would have cost far more to subdue the natives than it would ever produce in revenue. Today, far more wealth is created by Internet startups than could be stolen by a modern-day Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan.

To put the worthlessness of Somalia into perspective, here's some numbers:

• The GNP of Somalia is $2 billion.
• The market capitalization of Amazon.com is $32 billion. Its revenue in 2008 was $19.1 billion, and its net income was $0.64 billion.
• Bernie Madoff convinced people to invest at least $10 billion in a completely fraudulent stock fund, and reported $50 billion in bogus returns.