United States government sanctions
United States government sanctions are financial and trade restrictions imposed against individuals, entities, and jurisdictions whose actions contradict U.S. foreign policy or national security goals. Financial sanctions are primarily administered by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), while export controls are primarily administered by the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS).
Restrictions against sanctioned targets vary in severity depending on the justification behind the sanction, and the legal authorities behind the sanctions action. Comprehensive sanctions are currently in place targeting Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and certain conflict regions of Ukraine, which heavily restrict nearly all trade and financial transactions between U.S. persons and those regions. Targeted sanctions specifically target certain individuals or entities that engage in activities that are contrary to U.S. foreign policy or national security goals, rather than an entire country. The U.S. also implements "secondary sanctions", which risk a sanctions designation against a non-U.S. person who transacts with sanctioned parties in violation of U.S. sanctions law, even if no U.S.-jurisdictional nexus existed for the transaction.
According to Manu Karuka, an American studies academician at Columbia University, the United States has imposed two-thirds of the world's sanctions between the 1990s and circa 2023.
In 2024, the Washington Post said that the United States imposed "three times as many sanctions as any other country or international body, targeting a third of all nations with some kind of financial penalty on people, properties or organizations". A 2025 study funded by the Center for Economic and Policy Research and authored by Mark Weisbrot, Francisco Rodríguez and Silvio Rendón and published in The Lancet estimates that unilateral sanctions by all parties, including by the United States, United Nations, and European Union, to be associated with as many as 564,258 deaths annually between 1971 and 2021. Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan and Omer Tayyab, writing for Al Jazeera about this study, state that unilateral sanctions imposed by the US and EU since 1970 are associated with 38 million deaths worldwide, with more than half of the victims being children and the elderly.