EMBARGO

An embargo is a formal policy by a government to prevent the movement of exports either out of its own ports or into another country. It differs from a boycott in that it only involves the interruption of exports, not other financial or commercial transactions. A civil embargo is directed against one's own shippers to prevent them from shipping vital materials to warring nations. A hostile embargo is directed against the economic well-being of a foreign power.

Because of the central role of the U.S. economy in global trade, the United States frequently uses embargoes as effective, nonviolent tools of foreign policy. Although the United States declared its neutrality when Great Britain and France went to war in the early 1800s, both of the warring countries blocked U.S. merchant ships. And in 1807 a British warship killed three U.S. citizens while forcing four British-born "deserters" to rejoin the British Navy. In response, President Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809) convinced Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807, which banned all U.S. ships from trading in foreign ports. French and British ships continued to attack U.S. ships, however, and the damaging affects on the U.S. economy forced Jefferson to repeal the embargo in 1809. When Great Britain continued violating U.S. neutrality and commandeering U.S. sailors, Congress passed the Embargo Act of 1812 to block all trade between the United States and Great Britain.

During the American Civil War (1861–1865) the Confederacy considered placing an embargo on cotton shipments to Great Britain, to force Great Britain to enter the war as an ally. The Confederate Congress never passed the embargo, but Confederate state governments and individual citizens imposed a voluntary embargo on cotton exports to England. The British remained neutral throughout the war, and the Southern economy suffered greatly from the North's embargo on exports to the South.

In 1941 the United States imposed an embargo on German, Italian, French, and Danish ships in U.S. ports before it was finally forced to enter World War II (1939–1945) after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor. As a member of the United Nations, the United States used embargoes against North Korea and China during the Korean War (1950–1953), against Iraq after the Gulf War (1991), and against the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In June 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953–1961) imposed the longest-running embargo in U.S. history by blocking all exports (except food and medicine) to Cuba because of Fidel Castro's (1926–) hostile actions against U.S. interests.