We study an analogue of the Brauer-Manin obstruction to the local-global principle for embedding problems over global fields. We will prove the analogues of several fundamental structural results. In particular we show that the (algebraic) Brauer-Manin obstruction is the only one to weak approximation when the embedding problem has abelian kernel. As a part of our investigations we also give a new, elegant description of the Tate duality pairing and prove a new theorem on the cup product.