Why does no country want Bir Tawil?

No country wants Bir Tawil because wanting it would mean giving up something better. Bir Tawil is a 2,060 square kilometre patch of desert on the border between Egypt and Sudan, and the two countries disagree about which of two old British lines is the real border. Each line hands Bir Tawil to one country and a much richer area, the Hala'ib Triangle on the Red Sea, to the other. So both claim Hala'ib, and neither claims Bir Tawil.

The mess dates from colonial times. In 1899, a British–Egyptian agreement drew a perfectly straight line along the 22nd parallel. In 1902, the British drew a second, wiggly "administrative" line to match how local tribes actually used the land. Bir Tawil, used for grazing by the Ababda tribe from near Aswan, went to Egypt. Hala'ib, whose people were closer to Khartoum, went to Sudan.

Today Egypt insists on the straight 1899 line, which puts Hala'ib in Egypt and Bir Tawil in Sudan. Sudan insists on the 1902 line, which does the opposite. Claiming Bir Tawil would weaken each country's case for Hala'ib, which is ten times larger, has 27,000 people and a coastline. Bir Tawil has no permanent settlements, no sea and no surface water.

The result is the only habitable place on Earth that no recognised government claims. That has tempted dreamers: in 2014, a Virginia farmer named Jeremiah Heaton planted himself there and declared a kingdom so his daughter could be a princess. Nobody recognised it.