PARIS: US presidents are known for their high-profile foreign trips, but their destinations have evolved over recent decades in line with shifting US zones of influence and foreign policy priorities.
After a brief stopover at the Vatican for Pope Francis's funeral in late April where he met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump is now set to visit the Arabian peninsula for the first major foreign visit of his second term.
Since 1900, US presidents have made 834 overseas trips to 116 countries and territories, according to an AFP count based mainly on US State Department data.
Latin America dropped
Before World War II, when US presidential trips took place mainly by rail or ship, Latin America was often their first destination.
Between 1900 and 1939, 23 of their 47 trips were to the region, led by Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) and Franklin Roosevelt (1933-1945).
It was not only because the region was nearby, but also because Latin America was at the time a US zone of influence.
The United States played the role of the Americas' policeman, using a "big stick" approach under Theodore Roosevelt, before becoming in the 1930s "good neighbors" under Franklin Roosevelt.
Even as it lost ground to Europe in the 1950s and 1970s, Latin America remained one of the main destinations for US presidents until the 2000s.
During his first term from 2017-2021, Donald Trump only visited Latin America once, for a G20 summit in Buenos Aires in 2018. Joe Biden made just three trips to the region between 2021 and 2025.
Postwar Europe
After World War II, Europe became the favourite destination for US presidents.
The United States invested massively in the reconstruction of Europe, which had been ravaged by about six years of war.
It pumped in billions of dollars under the "Marshall Plan".
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961), John F Kennedy (1961-1963) and Richard Nixon (1969-1974) made 41 percent, 69 percent and 62 percent of their overseas visits, respectively, to Europe.
They were mainly to the west of the continent, as communist Eastern Europe had rejected the Marshall Plan.
London was their first port of call.
Only in the early 1970s did US presidents start to regularly touch down in Eastern Europe.
Nixon in May 1972 made the first visit by an American president to the Soviet Union, signing with Leonid Brezhnev the SALT I weapons-control treaty.
The United States played the role of the Americas' policeman, using a "big stick" approach under Theodore Roosevelt, before becoming in the 1930s "good neighbors" under Franklin Roosevelt.
Even as it lost ground to Europe in the 1950s and 1970s, Latin America remained one of the main destinations for US presidents until the 2000s.
During his first term from 2017-2021, Donald Trump only visited Latin America once, for a G20 summit in Buenos Aires in 2018. Joe Biden made just three trips to the region between 2021 and 2025.
Postwar Europe
After World War II, Europe became the favourite destination for US presidents.
The United States invested massively in the reconstruction of Europe, which had been ravaged by about six years of war.
It pumped in billions of dollars under the "Marshall Plan".
Presidents Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961), John F Kennedy (1961-1963) and Richard Nixon (1969-1974) made 41 percent, 69 percent and 62 percent of their overseas visits, respectively, to Europe.
They were mainly to the west of the continent, as communist Eastern Europe had rejected the Marshall Plan.
London was their first port of call.
Only in the early 1970s did US presidents start to regularly touch down in Eastern Europe.
Nixon in May 1972 made the first visit by an American president to the Soviet Union, signing with Leonid Brezhnev the SALT I weapons-control treaty.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Eastern Europe became the third most frequent destination for Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and the equal first by George W. Bush (2001-2009), who paid the most visits to Russia.
Clinton, whose presidency coincided with the wars in the former Yugoslavia, went on to make a record seven trips there, including three to Bosnia.
Middle East visited more
Before the 1970s, no US president had visited the Middle East.
Nixon was the first to go there in June 1974, visiting Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel and Jordan.
But after Clinton arrived, the Middle East became a region visited by US presidents more and more, as they tried and failed to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and also got involved in other conflicts in the region.
In a sign of its importance to the United States, Israel is the country most visited by US secretaries of state since the 1970s. The top US diplomats visited Israel 169 times in 55 years -- more than the number of visits to all of sub-Saharan Africa over the same period.
Asia-Pacific courted
East Asia and Southeast Asia became prized destinations for US presidents under Barack Obama (2009-2017) and during Trump's first term.
They paid about a quarter of their official foreign visits to the region.
Under the Obama administration, Washington launched a policy of "rebalancing" US strategic priorities towards the Asia-Pacific, in the face of the growing influence of China in the region.
The United States, in this respect, is dependent on traditional allies like Japan, the second most regular destination of Obama and Trump.