“Heard and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Australian territory, will now pay a 10 percent tariff on any exported goods the penguins there manage to export to the U.S.
So will the British Indian Ocean Territory—a U.K. overseas territory that (thanks to a mid-century ethnic cleansing) is depopulated but for military personnel and contractors at the island’s British and American bases.
The White House’s list also includes the French overseas departments and regions of French Guiana, Reunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Mayotte—all of which are legally part of France proper, and therefore have their trade policy set by the European Union.
How exactly uninhabited islands and administrative regions of France ended up on the White House’s tariff list isn’t exactly clear.
All do have their own two-letter country code on the United Nations Code for Trade and Transport Locations (UN/LODE), which is used to facilitate trade and generate trade data.
It’s possible then that the White House just cut and pasted from this list to create its own tariff targets.
To be sure, there are about 50 countries and territories on the UN/LODE list that don’t appear on the Trump administration’s tariff list. The White House’s list is at least curated enough to exclude U.S. overseas territories, the Vatican, and Palestine—all of which have their own UN/LODE code.”
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“Amazingly, the inclusion of uninhabited territories and administrative regions of larger countries and trade blocs fails to even match the administration’s own protectionist logic.
If the new tariffs are supposed to equalize bilateral trade balances between the U.S. and every other country, it makes little sense that the White House also levy tariffs on places that have no economic activity.
It also doesn’t make a lot of sense that it would tariff European overseas regions that don’t set their own trade policy.
If the White House is trying to create an equal balance of exports and imports with French Guiana, as opposed to France as a whole, why not also have Paris-specific tariffs?”