US soft power faces challenges, but the Super Bowl showed that it remains compelling
America was represented as a connected cultural space characterised by togetherness
The Super Bowl is often described as sport’s biggest spectacle, but that undersells what it really is.
The game matters, of course, but the halftime show is where the United States most clearly performs itself to the world. It is a ritual of national self-presentation, watched not just across the country but across the hemisphere and beyond. For fourteen minutes, America chooses what it wants to sound like, look like, and stand for.
This year, that performance exposed a striking contradiction at the heart of American soft power.
When Bad Bunny took the halftime stage, the response was polarised. Supporters saw a confident celebration of Latino culture and hemispheric belonging. Critics framed it as exclusionary, un-American, or politically loaded. Yet the performance itself was neither radical nor confrontational, just culturally accurate, and this is where it had power.
Soft power, rests on attraction rather than coercion. It flows from culture, values, and credibility. For decades, the United States has relied on exported cultural forms, Hollywood, pop music, global sport, to generate this influence. What is increasingly clear, however, is that one of America’s most potent soft-power resources now sits inside its own borders, largely unacknowledged.
Latinos make up around 20 percent of the US population, accounting for more than half of total population growth since 2000. The population is notably young, with a median age over a decade lower than that of White Americans, and overwhelmingly US-born.
Nearly four in five Latinos are US citizens, two-thirds by birth, including those born in US territories such as Puerto Rico. English proficiency is rising, college participation is increasing, and Latino populations are now geographically dispersed across the country rather than concentrated at the margins.
In demographic terms, perhaps the United States is already a Latino nation. In cultural terms, it has yet to fully accept that reality.
Bad Bunny’s performance briefly aligned American symbolism with American demographics. Puerto Rico was presented not as a peripheral territory but as a cultural centre. Spanish functioned not as a barrier but as an ordinary language of American life.
The performance mapped the Americas as a connected cultural space, culminating in the message “Together, We Are America.” This was an expansion of the United States, rather than one of rejection.
The backlash revealed how unprepared parts of the American political imagination remain for that expansion. Donald Trump dismissed the performance as an affront to American greatness, complaining that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Others echoed the claim that a Spanish-language show was exclusionary rather than inclusive.
At a time when US favourability across Latin America and the Caribbean has declined, and when China, Russia, and others are actively investing in cultural, economic, and diplomatic ties across the region, the United States already possesses a uniquely credible bridge.
Millions of citizens with familial, linguistic, and cultural connections throughout the hemisphere. A population that does not need to be persuaded to care about the region because it already lives within it.
Yet this asset is routinely framed as a problem to be managed rather than a resource to be mobilised.
Trump’s critique reveals a narrow understanding of American power, one rooted in visibility, dominance, and symbolic homogeneity rather than attraction, legitimacy, and cultural confidence. What he values, volume, spectacle, recognisability, is not soft power in Joseph Nye’s sense. It is more about performance without persuasion.
The irony is that the Super Bowl halftime show is itself a soft-power instrument. It is watched far beyond the United States, shaping perceptions of American society in ways that no policy document can.
This year’s show did more to communicate openness, cultural fluency, and hemispheric belonging than any official diplomatic initiative could hope to achieve. The discomfort it generated was not evidence of failure, but of misalignment between America’s demographic reality and its political self-image.
The reaction also matters domestically. Younger Latinos, particularly men under 30, are a volatile and politically consequential group. Public rejection of Latino cultural legitimacy does not reinforce national unity. It signals about who belongs. Soft power collapses when large segments of a population are treated as symbolic outsiders.
What made the performance effective was not its politics but its ordinariness. Domino games, street vendors, weddings, neighbourhoods, a casita placed at the centre of the field. There was no challenge to America, rather a mirror. It reflected a society that already exists but rarely appears in official national rituals.
The paradox is difficult to ignore.
The United States continues to ask how it can rebuild influence in Latin America while publicly rejecting the cultural forms that bind it most closely to the region. It searches abroad for soft power while neglecting the one it already has at home. The Super Bowl will never televise a revolution. It does not need to.
What it can do, occasionally, is reveal a future that is already present. This year, it did. The backlash that followed tells us about a country still uncertain whether it wants to recognise what its own soft power has already become.