Sweeping US tariffs hit some tiny targets around the world

President Donald Trump’s global trade war is taking on some unlikely adversaries — including remote islands with more penguins than people.

The list of 185 places hit Wednesday with a minimum 10 percent tariff include Heard Island and the McDonald Islands, Australian territories in the vast Indian Ocean between Africa and Antarctica.

Also on the list are tiny Norfolk Island in the South Pacific and an uninhabited spot in the Arctic Ocean called Jan Mayen, part of a Norwegian territory with the islands of Svalbard near the North Pole.

It’s all led to some head-scratching around the world as leaders digest Trump’s effort to punish countries that he says have taken advantage of U.S. trade policy to steal American jobs.

“I’m not quite sure that Norfolk Island, with respect to it, is a trade competitor with the giant economy of the United States, but that just shows and exemplifies the fact that nowhere on earth is exempt from this,” said Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The presence of such obscure locales might seem to undercut Trump’s tariff argument that other countries have been taking advantage of the U.S. and should be punished as a result. Asked about the issue, the White House told POLITICO that Norfolk, as well as the Heard and McDonald Islands, were listed because they are Australian territories.

Still, the White House list left many people puzzled — and rushing to the internet for answers.

On the list was the British Indian Ocean Territory, a collection of mostly uninhabited islands with no permanent population — with the exception of the joint U.S. and United Kingdom military base on the island Diego Garcia.

Svalbard has a population of just under 3,000 people, and Jan Mayen is uninhabited —except for 18 people temporarily working there for Norway’s military and meteorological service. Similarly, the island of Tokelau near New Zealand — home to less than 2,000 people — will also face tariffs.

But literally no people on the Heard and McDonald islands will feel the effects — because there’s no one there. Both are considered uninhabited, home to a large population of penguins and identified by Australia’s government as “one of the world’s least anthropogenically disturbed areas.” Nonetheless, the pair were hit with the minimum penalty of 10 percent.

The country that received the most severe tariffs, Lesotho, is one that “nobody had ever heard of,” according to Trump. The White House list said the landlocked African kingdom has its own tariffs of 99 percent — and thus will face a 50 percent penalty from the U.S.

Seb Starcevic contributed to this report.