Why embargoes always fail

Recent protests in Cuba have raised the perennial question of whether the US trade embargo does any good, says Peyton Gouzien. Since the 1960s Washington has severely restricted how much Americans can trade with the communist island. The idea is to deprive Cuba of “necessary goods”, putting pressure on the regime to change course.

Yet in practice embargoes often fail for the same reason that cartels – corporate conspiracies to keep prices high – fail. Just as a cartel requires every manufacturer to sell no more than agreed, so an embargo requires every country to cut off trade with the targeted government. Even close allies don’t always go along with US embargoes. Former US president Jimmy Carter’s 1980 grain embargo against the Soviet Union ended in failure after Moscow turned to Argentina and Australia to fill the gap. Virtually every other country in the Americas trades with Cuba. Embargoes are ultimately a matter of asking “others to take an economic loss for no economic gain”. That is always going to be difficult to sustain.