embargo

embargo, legal prohibition by a government or group of governments restricting the departure of vessels or movement of goods from some or all locations to one or more countries.

Embargoes may be broad or narrow in scope. A trade embargo, for example, is a prohibition on exports to one or more countries, though the term is often used to refer to a ban on all commerce. In contrast, a strategic embargo restricts only the sale of goods that make a direct and specific contribution to a country’s military power; similarly, an oil embargo prohibits only the export of oil. Broad embargoes often allow the export of certain goods (e.g., medicines or foodstuffs) to continue for humanitarian purposes, and most multilateral embargoes include escape clauses that specify a limited set of conditions under which exporters may be exempt from their prohibitions.

An embargo is a tool of economic warfare that may be employed for a variety of political purposes, including demonstrating resolve, sending a political signal, retaliating for another country’s actions, compelling a country to change its behaviour, deterring it from engaging in undesired activities, and weakening its military capability. For example, in 1992 the United States redoubled its efforts to enforce compliance with its decades-long embargo against Cuba in order to retaliate for the downing of a civilian American airplane by the Cuban air force and to demonstrate its resolve to maintain the trade restrictions despite growing opposition to them at home and abroad. An embargo also may be employed to prohibit exports of arms and other war matériel to belligerent states or to states in rebellion, either in an attempt—usually collective—to force a cessation of hostilities or in an individual state’s effort to preserve its neutrality. In 1937 the United States imposed an arms embargo for this purpose on both sides in the Spanish Civil War, and in 1991 the United Nations attempted to halt the fighting in the former Yugoslavia by imposing an arms embargo against all the belligerents. An embargo may also be imposed to prevent potentially threatening countries from increasing their military power. Throughout the Cold War, for example, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) managed a multilateral embargo that restricted the export of strategic goods from its member states to the Soviet Union. Since the end of the Cold War, strategic embargoes have been imposed against Iraq, Libya, and North Korea.

The enforcement of an embargo may involve the detention of merchant vessels or other property to prevent their movement to a foreign territory. Such actions may be civil or hostile. Whereas civil embargoes consist of the detention of national vessels in home ports either to protect them from foreign depredation or to prevent goods from reaching a particular country, hostile embargoes involve the detention of the vessels or other property of a foreign country.

Embargoes are not imposed against enemy ships and other property, because their status as enemy property usually subjects them to other types of action (e.g., military attack), but they can be imposed by belligerents on neutral ships—who also may exercise the right of angary—and by neutrals on belligerent ships. For example, in 1941, before it officially became a belligerent, the United States seized German, Italian, Danish, and French ships lying idle in American waters and also froze the assets of the Axis powers.

Multilateral embargoes require collective cooperation and are most likely to be effective when all countries that have the capacity to undermine them abide by their restrictions. The ability of a targeted country to acquire embargoed goods from a third party is likely to reduce its effectiveness. In addition, embargoes put exporters in countries imposing the embargo at a disadvantage relative to their competitors in countries that do not abide by the embargo by denying them access to markets in the targeted country. For example, American companies often complained that the U.S. embargo against Vietnam did not prevent Vietnamese consumers from acquiring American computers and other embargoed goods through third parties. The issue of “foreign availability” is often used to justify exemptions from participating in an embargo, and indeed it was one of the primary justifications offered for ending the U.S. embargo against Vietnam in 1994. In other contexts, critics of embargoes have challenged them on ethical grounds, arguing that they often impose greater costs on the general population in the targeted country than on its political or military leadership.