President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on more than 180 trading partners of the United States last week.
He described these as “reciprocal tariffs” against countries that impose heavy duties on US imports, aimed at rebalancing a global trade equation that he has long argued is weighted against his country.
The president has cited imbalanced US trade to justify his argument. Indeed, the US has the largest trade deficit in the world and, in 2023, its import costs were $1.1 trillion more than its exports.
However, some of his tariff targets are sparsely populated islands that barely trade with the US and pose little economic challenge to the world’s largest economy.
Still, others are countries that the US has a trade surplus with — raising questions about the Trump administration’s formula for calculating the tariffs, even as it says dozens of countries are lining up to negotiate with Washington on lowering the duties slapped on their goods.
So what is the tariff formula used by the Trump team? Which are some of the hardest-to-explain targets? And can negotiations help these and other countries and territories?
How did Trump calculate the reciprocal tariffs?
When Trump announced the tariffs, he held up a chart listing the “reciprocal tariff” percentages for each country and territory next to the tariffs that he claimed these nations and territories were imposing on US imports.
In fact, he claimed that he was being gentle and imposing tariffs that were half, in many cases, of the tariffs that he said the target countries were imposing on US goods.
But, in reality, the formula used by the Trump administration to calculate what it says are reciprocal tariffs has nothing to do with the tariffs imposed by other countries on the US at all.
Instead, to determine its tariff rate for a country, the administration has divided the trade deficit by two times the value of total imports from that country and multiplied the resulting number by 100 to obtain a percentage value.
A trade deficit occurs when a country’s imports are worth more than its exports, while a surplus refers to when exports are of higher value than imports.
For example, the US trade deficit with China in 2024 was $295bn and the total imports from China were $439bn. Dividing the deficit by the imports yields 0.67, and this number halved is 0.34. Trump has imposed a reciprocal tariff of 34 percent on China. The equation does not actually factor in the tariff percentage that China has imposed on US products.
And the Trump administration has not followed even this formula uniformly — if it did, there should be no tariffs imposed on countries and territories with which the US has a trade surplus.
Here are some of Trump’s most bizarre tariff targets:
Islands with few people, negligible trade:
Heard Island and McDonald Islands
Trump hit the Australian territory of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, about 1,700km (1,056 miles) from Antarctica and 4,000km (2,485 miles) from Perth city, with a 10 percent tariff.
These islands are not inhabited by people, but instead by seals, penguins, and other flying bird species.
World Bank data shows that in 2022, the US imported products worth $1.4m from the islands. Most of these products are unnamed “electronics and machinery”. In 2024, the US did not trade at all with the territory, according to US Census data.
Australian leaders, including Trade Minister Don Farrell, speculated that Trump tariffed the islands by mistake. “Poor old penguins, I don’t know what they did to Trump, but, look, I think it’s an indication, to be honest with you, that this was a rushed process,” Farrell told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on April 4.
But Trump’s aides insist that this was not a mistake.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told CBS News on Sunday that the islands were tariffed so that Trump’s other tariff targets do not try to bypass their tariffs by exporting their products to the US through remote islands like Heard and McDonald. “If you leave anything off the list, the countries that try to basically arbitrage America go through those countries to us,” said Lutnick.
Norfolk Island
Trump also slapped a 29 percent tariff on another Australian territory, Norfolk Island.
The territory is in the South Pacific Ocean, about 1,600km (990 miles) northeast of Sydney, with a population of about 2,000. World Bank data shows that the US imported goods worth $273,000 in 2022 from the territory. Most of these goods were labelled as “chemicals”.
In 2024, the US had a trade deficit of $100,000 with Norfolk Island.
“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 safe from this,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said, speaking of the tariffs imposed on the territory.
Cocos Island
Cocos or Keeling Islands is another Australian territory in the Indian Ocean with a 10 percent tariff.
The island with 544 people had a trade surplus of $1.5m with the US in 2024.
Christmas Island
Yet another Australian territory in the Indian Ocean – home to 1,692 people – Christmas Island also faces a 10 percent US tariff.
In 2024, the territory had a trade surplus of $400,000 with the US. A quarter of the island’s exports go to the US, where it sends paintings, amine compounds — chemicals used for making nylon and dyes — and broadcasting equipment, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity.
Tokelau
This territory of New Zealand in the Southern Pacific Ocean has been hit with a 10 percent tariff by the US.
In 2024, Tokelau had a $100,000 trade surplus with the US, exporting $200,000 worth of products. The total population of these atolls is 2,600, according to World Population Review.
Reunion
Trump has charged Reunion, a small French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, with a 37 percent tariff, according to a chart shared on X by the White House on April 2. The island is about 9,000km (5,600 miles) from France.
Its total population is 882,000, according to the latest World Population Review data. The US had a $32.2m trade deficit with Reunion in 2024.
British Indian Ocean Territory
Trump has hit the overseas British territory with 10 percent tariffs — even though its only real trading hub is a military base that the US counts as among its most strategic footholds in the Indian Ocean.
The territory, a group of several islands, does not have a permanent population. However, there is a joint military base of the US and the United Kingdom on its largest island, Diego Garcia. Some 4,000 people, mostly military personnel, inhabit this base.
The US had a $5m trade deficit with the territory in 2024, which exported products worth $500,000 to the country last year.
Like many of these small islands, large countries that the US has a trade surplus with too have been hit with tariffs — defying the formula used to justify levies.
Countries the US has a trade surplus with
Australia
The US has imposed a 10 percent tariff on Australia, saying Canberra charges it 10 percent tariffs.
Australia is a strange target because the US does not have a trade deficit with the country, a variable that falls at the centre of the tariff calculation. In 2024, it enjoyed a trade surplus of $17.9bn with Australia, according to US Census data.
In 2023, 3.57 percent of Australian exports went to the US. Responding to the tariffs on Australia, Albanese said: “The administration’s tariffs have no basis in logic and they go against the basis of our two nations’ partnership.”
United Kingdom
Trump has hit the UK with a 10 percent tariff as a reciprocal move.
The US also does not have a trade deficit with the UK; instead, it had a trade surplus of nearly $12bn.
In 2023, nearly 24 percent of the UK’s exports went to the US.
Netherlands
Trump has hit the Netherlands, alongside other countries in the European Union, with a 20 percent tariff. However, the US does not have a trade deficit with the country. In fact, in 2024, it had a surplus of nearly $56bn.
Vaccines are the Netherlands’ top export to the US.
Belgium
As a part of the EU, Belgium faces a 20 percent US tariff.
In 2024, the US had approximately $6.3bn of trade surplus with Belgium.
Brazil
Brazil faces a 10 percent tariff from the US despite its trade deficit of $7.4bn in 2024.
The US is the second-largest market for Brazilian exports after accounting for 10.4 percent of its exports.
Do negotiations matter at all?
On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told NBC’s Meet the Press that more than 50 countries had reached out to the US to negotiate the tariffs. “This figure should be interpreted more as a sign of confusion than clarity,” Carlos Lopes, a Chatham House associate fellow for the Africa Programme, told Al Jazeera.
It is unclear what those talks will be about since the tariffs imposed by Trump are not reciprocal — contrary to the US claims — and are based, in many cases, instead on its trade deficit with those nations. And even countries with which the US has a trade surplus have not been left unscathed.
“Many of these contacts are likely exploratory, driven by uncertainty rather than a well-defined negotiation agenda. The ambiguity of the ‘reciprocal tariff’ concept — especially as applied unilaterally — raises more questions than it answers,” said Lopes, whose areas of expertise include international trade and China.
In many ways, say experts, all of this underscores what the tariffs are really about — and what they are not about.
The goal of Trump’s tariff announcement was not to display mathematical precision, but to display power, Manoj Kewalramani, chairperson of the Indo-Pacific Research Programme and a China studies fellow at the Indian public policy centre Takshashila Institution, told Al Jazeera.
The tariffs are aimed at bringing countries to the negotiating table to discuss broader US economic concerns, he suggested. “Now whether that’s actually what’s going to happen as an outcome remains to be seen.”
It is also unclear whether the US is open to negotiations. While Trump’s close aide billionaire Elon Musk has expressed hopes for “a zero-tariff situation” between the US and Europe, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has said the tariffs are here to stay.
“Trade policy, particularly in goods, is part of a long-term framework shaped by decades of negotiated multilateral and bilateral commitments. Attempting to reframe it as a series of ad hoc deals, driven by perceived imbalances in goods trade alone, risks replacing a positive-sum system with a zero-sum logic,” said Lopes.
Ultimately, Kewalramani said, Trump’s stated goal is to reindustrialise the US and create jobs. “I don’t think the tariff policy is aimed at achieving one goal, but instead was a silver bullet thought in Trump’s head,” he said.
“Maybe to some extent, it will stimulate industry, but it won’t bring back the jobs that went away 35 years ago,” Kewalramani said.
What it will do, he said, is reduce overall trade. “If Trump wants to see that as a reduction of deficit, fair enough.”
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