The Foreign Travels of Bernie Sanders

For decades, Bernie Sanders has traveled the world, pursuing an unconventional approach to diplomacy. American politicians often visit other countries to project influence abroad and strengthen existing alliances. Foreign travel can also be leisurely, allowing elected officials to play tourist and spend time in luxury hotels. Of course, not everyone sticks to the same script. Sanders has charted a different course, traveling abroad to dissent against his own government, and critique the way America wields power on a global stage. He has risked controversy by extending an olive branch to left-leaning governments shunned by the American political establishment. Along the way, Sanders has demonstrated a deep interest in foreign policy, and a desire to shape the way the world views the United States.

As a member of Congress, Sanders has visited at least 41 countries, including Mexico, China, Israel, Vietnam, and South Africa, over the course of more than two dozen government-sponsored and privately-funded trips. His travels have taken him to the Middle East to visit a refugee camp in Jordan, discuss the Syrian conflict with diplomats in Turkey, and meet U.S. military officials in Afghanistan. Sanders has traveled to Central America to warn against the dangers of flawed trade policy, and spent a considerable amount of time visiting Nordic nations that he now holds up as models for America to emulate.

While serving as mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders made foreign travel something of a priority, a rarity for an elected official involved in city government. He even set off on a trip to the Soviet Union after marrying his wife, Jane, in an effort to cement a sister-city relationship. (“Trust me. It was a very strange honeymoon,” Sanders wrote in his updated memoir Outsider In the White House.)

Throughout his travels, Sanders has articulated the idea that domestic and foreign priorities are inextricably linked. He has consistently railed against corporate power and advocated for workers’ rights, applying the same lens to foreign policy that he uses to diagnose many of the problems he sees in American society. That’s the picture that emerges from an examination of public travel records and media coverage of his trips; Sanders’s memoir; a partial list of countries he has visited provided by his Senate office; and Legistorm, a database that tracks privately financed congressional travel.