This week’s finalized list elicited reprieve but also dismay— often with little or no explanation.
The harshest import taxes were slapped on Syria (41%), Laos and Myanmar (40%), three relatively poor nations with, at best, modest trading relationships with Washington. And Iraq, Serbia (both 35%) and Algeria (30%) also found themselves subject to Trump’s executive pen.
(Brazil faces its own separate 50% tariff as punishment for what Trump says is a “witch hunt” against its former president and his right-wing ally, Jair Bolsonaro, who is accused of plotting a coup.)
Elsewhere Thursday, Lesotho’s 50% rate was slashed to 15% — but not before huge damage was already wrought. The initial tariff saw American buyers pausing orders, thousands of people losing their jobs and the government declaring a state of disaster.
Meanwhile the Heard and McDonald Islands and its flightless bird inhabitants dodged the tariff Trump threatened to impose on Australia, which owns the islands, and remained at the 10% rate first announced in April.
It is “hard to tell if there is any logic” to deciphering why some countries have been hit so hard while others were spared, said David Henig, a trade expert at the European Center for International Political Economy, a think tank based in Brussels.
Without a detailed explanation from the White House, Henig told NBC News, the calculations were most likely based on the previous formula Washington used that placed the biggest tariffs on the countries with the biggest trade surpluses.
In announcing the tariffs Thursday, Trump said these surpluses “constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States.” (Many economists disagree that the U.S. trade deficit is inherently a bad thing, and his tariffs are the subject of an ongoing legal fight that is likely to end up at the Supreme Court.)
While the international uproar over Lesotho meant it was given a reprieve, other nations may have seen their tariffs maintained or even increased because “they weren’t the most obviously unfairly treated developing countries,” Henig said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NBC News on its rationale.
It’s not only developing or obscure places feeling the heat of Trump’s taxes.
Switzerland — one of the richest nations in terms of gross domestic product per capita — awoke Friday to find that it had been slapped with a colossal 39% rate, which its government noted with “great regret.”
This could spell trouble for Swiss chocolate and luxury watches, for which the U.S. is the largest market, with shares for Watches of Switzerland Group PLC tumbling 8.5% following the news Friday.