Heard Island and McDonald Islands, the uninhabited territory where Trump has imposed tariffs

Photo courtesy of Stephen Brown/AAD. Retrieved from english.elpais.com

Donald Trump’s trade war knows no bounds. In his joint address to Congress in early March, the president disparagingly referred to “the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of.” Lesotho has now been slapped with 50% tariffs. But what has come as even more of a surprise is that the list of countries included in the annex to the “reciprocal tariffs” decree signed on Wednesday includes small islands and territories that do not trade with the United States. Among them are Heard Island and McDonald Islands, an uninhabited Australian external territory in the Indian Ocean near Antarctica. The islands are home to sparse vegetation, insects, seabirds, penguins, and seals. But from now on, products exported (?) to the United States will be subject to a 10% tariff.

The tariff is the same as that applied to all Australian imports, but the explicit inclusion of Heard Island and McDonald Islands, which probably even fewer people have heard of than Lesotho, has become a source of ridicule. Heard Island and McDonald Islands have been an external territory of Australia since 1947. Heard Island is mountainous, dominated by Mawson Peak, a 9,006-foot volcano, making it Australia’s highest peak. The neighboring McDonald Islands is a small and rocky place. Both island clusters have a total area of 142 square miles, roughly half the size of Lanzarote in Spain’s Canary Islands.

The islands are located about 2,200 nautical miles southwest of Perth, Western Australia. That puts them about 880 nautical miles north of Antarctica and about 2,300 nautical miles southeast of South Africa. The French territory of the Kerguelen Islands is the closest landfall and is about 240 nautical miles northwest. It takes about 10 days, depending on the weather, to reach Heard Island by ship from the Port of Fremantle, near Perth, Western Australia, according to a publication by the Australian Antarctic Program. People and cargo can also be disembarked on land by helicopter, inflatable rubber boat, or amphibious vehicle supported from a larger vessel.