Researcher

The Modern Embargo

In the twenty-first century, the embargo has become one of the most potent instruments of foreign policy. Wavering precariously between diplomacy, economic warfare, and moral signalling, it occupies ambiguous ground between peace and coercion and is often deployed as a "middle way" when the costs of outright war are too great. Yet its outcomes remain largely unpredictable and uneven. The economic weapon it represents today cannot, of course, be transposed directly into the eighth century, but its animating principle, that access to exchange can be weaponised, offers a useful point of orientation.

In modern usage, an embargo is a legal prohibition imposed by a government or coalition of governments restricting the movement of goods to or from a target nation.1Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "embargo." It can range from partial restrictions on specific commodities to comprehensive bans designed to strangle entire economies. Recent years have witnessed a marked resurgence of embargoes and tariffs as tools of geopolitical leverage. The United States, for instance, has imposed sweeping export controls on advanced semiconductors to China in an attempt to slow its military modernisation.2"The U.S. Semiconductor Export Ban on China," Council on Foreign Relations, October 2022. Since 2019, it has maintained full embargoes on Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, and Venezuela, each framed as an effort to coerce policy or regime change.3U.S. Department of the Treasury, "Sanctions Programs and Country Information," Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), 2019–24. Meanwhile, Brexit and the trade wars ignited under Donald Trump have ruptured the apparent stability of global supply chains, revealing how swiftly political will can reconfigure economic reality.4James Politi and Demetri Sevastopulo, "How Donald Trump's Trade Wars Reshaped the Global Economy," Financial Times, July 7, 2024; Douglas A. Irwin, "The Trump Trade War," Foreign Affairs 98, no. 4 (2019); Sam Lowe, "Brexit and the Re-fragmentation of Trade," Journal of European Public Policy 30, no. 2 (2023).

The current conflict in Ukraine has intensified the reach and complexity of such measures.5Nicholas Mulder, "The Weaponized Economy: Sanctions and the New Era of Economic Warfare," Foreign Affairs 101, no. 5 (2022): 78–91. Sanctions and counter-sanctions have fragmented global energy markets, with Western embargoes on Russian oil and gas exposing Europe's own dependence on external supply.6Richard Connolly, "Sanctions, Energy and the Russian Economy," Survival 64, no. 2 (2022): 105–22. Despite their intent to constrain aggression, modern embargoes have also generated unintended consequences: inflation, evasion through third-party intermediaries and the strengthening of alternative alliances. As scholars of economic statecraft such as David Baldwin have observed, the use of trade as a political weapon cannot be reduced to economics alone. It functions as a relational form of power - "the use of economic means within a system of power relations" - whose efficacy depends as much on perception, legitimacy, and enforcement as on the measures themselves.7David A. Baldwin, Economic Statecraft (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 32.

If embargoes today are intricate instruments of law and diplomacy, their unpredictability and ambiguity are hardly new. Even in the modern world, they suffer from leakage, evasion, and competing interests among supposed allies. These features invite reflection upon their earlier incarnations - moments when rulers sought to regulate exchange not through a codified international law but through customary diplomatic feedback loops of peace, reciprocity and mutual protection, sometimes formalised in the form of treaties or expressed through mechanisms such as custom tolls or exemptions.

To look back to the late eighth century, when Charlemagne and Offa of Mercia enacted a deliberate suspension of trade, is therefore to revisit an early form of this economic logic: coercion through denial. Moreover, the embargo's long history makes tangible what Anderson and Berdahl define as the essence of power itself - "the ability to provide or withhold valued resources or administer punishments to others", a capacity grounded in the control of exchange itself.8Cameron Anderson and Jennifer L. Berdahl, "The Experience of Power: Examining the Effects of Power on Approach and Inhibition Tendencies," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 83, no. 6 (2002): 1362.