What is an embargo?

The word has other senses — a press embargo delays publication of a story, an academic embargo withholds a thesis for a period — but in law, trade and compliance an embargo is a jurisdiction-wide restriction. It is the oldest sanctions instrument: the English word arrived from Spanish in the early 1600s as an order barring merchant ships from a port, and the modern version bars goods, services, money and technology instead of hulls.

Embargoes rarely stand alone today. Most sanctions programs pair a country-level embargo with lists of designated people, companies and, increasingly, crypto wallet addresses connected to the target — so a business complying with an embargo also ends up screening parties against those lists.

Sanctions is the broad category: any restrictive measure a government uses to change a target's behaviour without force. An embargo is one kind of sanction, defined by its scope — it applies to a whole country, region or sector rather than to named parties. A targeted, list-based sanction names a person or company; an embargo names a place or an activity.

The distinction matters operationally because the two are enforced differently. A list-based designation is enforced by screening counterparties against the list. An embargo is enforced by knowing where a counterparty, user or shipment is — which is why jurisdiction controls such as IP geolocation sit next to list screening in a compliance program.

Embargoes are usually described by what they restrict. A trade embargo bans imports, exports or both with the target — the classic form, and what people mean by a comprehensive embargo when it also covers services and finance. An arms embargo bans weapons and military equipment only, and is the form the UN Security Council uses most. A strategic or sectoral embargo restricts goods and services that feed a particular capability: dual-use technology, energy equipment, access to capital markets. An oil embargo restricts petroleum trade in one direction or the other; the 1973 OAPEC embargo on countries supporting Israel is the best-known example.

Reach varies too. A primary embargo binds persons under the issuing jurisdiction. Secondary or extraterritorial measures penalise third-country parties for dealing with the target, which is how a national embargo shapes the behaviour of banks and suppliers far outside its borders.

The United States maintains a small set of comprehensive embargoes: Cuba, in force since February 1962 and the longest-running US program; Iran, comprehensive since 1995; North Korea; and the Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, embargoed at region level since 2014 and 2022 respectively. Embargoes also end: the comprehensive Syria program was wound down in 2025 and replaced by a program targeting Assad-era figures, so Syria is no longer an embargoed country in the US sense.

The UN Security Council imposes arms embargoes by resolution, implemented by every member state — North Korea under Resolution 1718 (2006) and Libya under Resolution 1970 (2011) are two that remain in force, and the mandatory arms embargo on apartheid-era South Africa under Resolution 418 (1977) is the historical template. The European Union's measures against Russia since 2014, expanded sharply in 2022, are the standard contrast: sweeping sectoral restrictions on finance, energy and technology that most businesses treat as an embargo in practice, but that are legally a set of targeted and sectoral sanctions rather than a full trade ban.

For the maintained US table — every comprehensive and selective country program with the OFAC page behind it, and a verification date — use the OFAC sanctioned countries list rather than this page; it is the artifact that changes.

The Embargo Act of 1807, signed by President Thomas Jefferson on 22 December 1807, closed US ports to nearly all foreign trade in response to British and French interference with neutral American shipping during the Napoleonic Wars. It was meant to pressure both powers by withholding American goods; instead it collapsed US exports, fostered smuggling through Canada and devastated New England's merchants. Congress repealed it with the Non-Intercourse Act on 1 March 1809, days before Jefferson left office. It is the episode the phrase embargo definition US history usually points to, and an early lesson that an embargo costs the country imposing it as well as its target.

An embargo binds everyone under the issuing jurisdiction — in the US, all US persons and any transaction that touches the US financial system — and US civil enforcement is strict liability: a violation does not require knowledge or intent. Prohibited dealings typically include exporting to or importing from the target, providing services to persons there, processing payments connected to it, and facilitating any of those for someone else.

Exceptions are handled through licences. General licences authorise defined categories — humanitarian goods, personal remittances, certain communications services — without an application; specific licences are granted case by case. Outside the comprehensive set, asking whether a country is embargoed is usually the wrong question: most country programs restrict named sectors or parties within an otherwise open economy, and the obligation is to screen the party, not to block the place.

Three controls cover most of it. First, know the jurisdiction: geolocate the user or counterparty at signup and per session, and check the country against the current embargo set — CompliAPI's geolocation endpoint returns the country with a sanctioned flag, and the country-screening endpoint returns each OFAC designation with its category and program page. Second, distrust a location that comes through a VPN: the VPN endpoint's true / false / unknown signal tells your policy how much weight the apparent country deserves. Third, screen the parties themselves against the SDN and other lists, because embargoes and designations overlap and a party from an embargoed country is often listed as well.

OFAC's 2021 sanctions compliance guidance for the virtual currency industry names geolocation and IP-blocking controls explicitly, so the same three controls apply to crypto platforms as to any other business.