It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story.

Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.

Isn't this just common sense? I mean, if there are no people/production/imports in a certain territory, it doesn't mean that all of this won't appear there literally tomorrow, especially when tariffs on goods from these territories are zero.

That doesn't seem likely, because they separately listed parts of France that are wholly in the EU (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana, separate tariffs there are as meaningless as having separate tariffs for Berlin and Munich) but they also did not list those that are NOT part of the EU (EDIT one list I found does list French Polynesia, but not New Caledonia[0]) even though they are the ones where a separate rate would make the "most" sense (if any of this makes sense anyway).

There is trade today between New Caledonia, or French Polynesia, and the US. They are probably going to be tariffed at the rate for France, which is probably going to be the one for the EU, but who knows, neither New Caledonia nor France itself are listed.

It is really apparent that there is no understanding behind this half-assed list.

[0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-...

If that’s the thinking, they forgot Antarctica, the Marianas trench, and the Moon. Someone could, theoretically, take advantage of the lack of tariffs.

I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.

If there are no people there is no government to trade with, no customs, no regulations.

It takes a lot longer to set all of that up than it takes for Trump to just raise another tariff if that happens. So nobody would invest in that. It would only be a loophole for a week or so.

So why bother doing this pre-emptively (even if that was the reason)?

It's like they pulled a list "All Countries the US Trades With" off wikipedia used that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.

Very likely that is literally what they did.

Strictly speaking it also includes some British military and contract staff from other countries (cleaning, landscaping etc, whatever they need).

Where is this list posted by the US Government? These countries aren't in Annex I of the Executive Order.

It has British in the name of course. Gotta tariff those leeches. /s