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President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries Wednesday, sending global stock markets plummeting and alarming leaders both in the U.S. and abroad. In fact, his tariffs were so wide-ranging that they caught up territories in far-flung corners of the Earth, including remote islands with no human inhabitants.
The list of nations Trump has targeted with steep tariffs include Heard and McDonald Islands, an external territory of Australia near Antartica that is home to a number of penguin species — and zero humans. Those islands have no trade with the U.S., according to the Census Bureau, and have not seen any human activity in decades — but they were hit with a 10% “reciprocal tariff” by the Trump administration nevertheless.
Other small territories with (human) populations that number only in the thousands were similarly ensnared:
- 10% tariffs on Norway’s Svalbard, with a population of 2,500, and Jan Mayen, which has no permanent inhabitants;
- 10% tariffs on Tokelau island, a territory of New Zealand with a population of 1,500;
- 10% tariffs on the British Indian Ocean Territory, which is occupied by approximately 3,000 U.K. — and U.S. — military personnel and civilian contractors;
- 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island, another Australian territory with a population of about 2,000 people.
The seemingly erratic choice to target such minuscule economies seemed to perplex even Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
“I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island — with respect to it — is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States,” Albanese said Thursday. “But that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on Earth is safe from this.”
Given the Trump administration’s confounding calculation of the “reciprocal tariff” rates for each country, the inclusion of these tiny territories should probably not come as a surprise.
Notably, one country that was not slated to face Trump’s tariffs was Russia, which exported about $3 billion in goods (mainly fertilizer and other raw materials) to the U.S. last year — far more than many of the smaller nations that Trump also targeted.