Pax Americana supposedly ended in 2012, or is in its last days in 2023, or could soon be ending in 2024. Simultaneously, it also returned in 2022, right after it was a myth in 2020. And yet, the debate is the consensus. Pax Americana – the peace in the Western hemisphere and eventually, the world, after the Allied victory in the second World War – is the name given to our world order, in which America shapes global interests and activities. We constantly talk about America, even if it’s to wonder about the state of its influence.

This is how images, videos, and reports from the Super Bowl – a football tournament in the United States – were omnipresent all over the world on Monday. Many of us living continents away still don’t know what the Super Bowl is. But knowledge of its existence is inevitable both for the initiated and the uninitiated. Usher performed at the halftime show. Beyoncé announced her new album. Taylor Swift was there. When her boyfriend’s team won, they kissed in front of the cameras. Ice Spice was around too. Blake Lively cheered with Taylor Swift. The American President posted a joke photo of himself with laser-point eyes – some reference to the game lost on anyone outside America who doesn’t get it, but it was broadcast to them (us) anyway.

While this was going on, Israel launched attacks on Rafah. Rafah is a city in the Gaza Strip that is landlocked by the Egyptian border on one side, the remains of Gaza City on the other, the Mediterranean sea on the left, Israel on the right. Displaced civilians were previously ordered by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to seek shelter in Rafah. Amnesty has said there is a “very real risk of genocide,” as more than 67 civilians have already been killed in Rafah. Now, as Israel reportedly prepares for a ground invasion of Rafah, there is nowhere left to go. Hardly any mainstream media attention was paid to this fact – and if it was, it was with equal, if not less, airtime than the viral photographs of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.

Here are some stats. Three of the world’s seven major multinational media corporations are American, but all seven have major operations in America. They all own all the American film studios, most American TV networks, most commercial cable TV channels worldwide. NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO), for their part, cleared the path for these companies to create a global media empire, dominated by America. “What you are seeing,” Christopher Dixon, media analyst for the investment firm PaineWebber, told Monthly Review, “is the creation of a global oligopoly. It happened to the oil and automotive industries earlier this century; now it is happening to the entertainment industry.”

There has been a debate on the application of WTO rules to cultural products. “In the summer of 1998, culture ministers from twenty nations, including Brazil, Mexico, Sweden, Italy and Ivory Coast, met in Ottawa to discuss how they could ‘build some ground rules’ to protect their cultural fare from ‘the Hollywood juggernaut,’” noted Robert W. McChesney in Monthly Review; their main recommendation was to reportedly keep culture out of the WTO. But that didn’t happen. Despite longstanding efforts toward a “cultural exemption,” America managed to keep the clause out of the WTO, succeeding in allowing cultural goods to be treated like other goods and services: “The U.S. government, with lobbying from the entertainment industry, has adopted the policy of fiercely resisting any recognition of the cultural exception in international law and fighting for the application of free trade principles to all cultural products,” notes one paper.

Culture, then, became an important part of American dominance. Former U.S. National Security Advisor Brzezinski once famously said: “strengthening American culture as the ‘model’ of the world’s cultures is a strategy that must be implemented by the United States to maintain hegemony.” Under Pax Americana, culture is subject to the same rules of the globalized free market as any other good, which is to say, there are no rules preventing its purchase and sale. Here’s how the scholar Frederic Jameson put it: "The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes, and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization."

That’s not even accounting for Silicon Valley-born social media giants. What happens to the world order when not just culture but the very flow of information is also directed by America? The cognitive dissonance brought about by an infinite scroll that shows the Super Bowl overshadowing the bombing of Rafah is best explained by Thomas Friedman’s assertion: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-l5. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Arguably, the push and pull of culture dictated by money flows is why Hollywood’s push for global box office success has prompted regional industries to change their films too, in order to compete – losing cultural specificity in the process. One analysis showed that among countries where more than 25 films are produced per year, American films top the top 10 lists, followed by local films. Further, that the CIA is invested in shaping mass media, especially some Hollywood films and literary journals, is an established fact by now. There’s a name for all this: cultural imperialism. In other words, it’s no accident that we might know more about Miley Cyrus’ performance at the Grammys than about an ongoing genocide in Sudan. Knowledge and awareness of one does, in fact, shape knowledge and awareness (or the lack thereof) of the other.

The scholar Herbert Schiller, who coined the term cultural imperialism, did so based on the argument that the global flow of media products from America to the rest of the world is a key aspect of Western imperialism. Adding to that, Jeremy Tunstall noted, “the cultural imperialism theory has claimed that authentic, traditional and local culture in many parts of the world is being overwhelmed by the indiscriminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial media products, mainly from the US.”

And so, with most of the world’s media thus being owned – or shaped by – American economic interests, and with American economic interests shaped by its military interests, it makes sense that CBS allowed space for the Israeli government to air an advertisement during the Super Bowl. “136 seats are still available for Sunday's game. One for each Israeli hostage held captive by Hamas,” it read, ending with the hashtag #BringThemHomeNow. It makes even more sense that not a lot of noise has been made about the ethics of running another government’s campaign during the event: Israel is the largest recipient of American foreign aid, having received $300 billion since its founding. Approximately $3.3 billion a year is provided as a grant under the Foreign Military Financing program, with the American President having pledged an additional $14 billion more last year. Israel’s ad during the Super Bowl, then, aligns with America’s stated policies. And the entertainment can’t be detached from it.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. “The Super Bowl has been used as a driver of war in the past, most famously when Whitney Houston sang the national anthem in 1991 as war planes flew overhead in the lead-up to Operation Desert Storm and when U2 and Bono fanned the flames of post-9/11 America in 2002,” wrote Dave Zirin in The Nation.

The Super Bowl itself has evolved to become a quintessential symbol of American culture, where neoliberalism, consumerism, foreign policy, and entertainment are all indistinguishable from one another. As one analysis notes: “The Super Bowl’s dedication to the celebration of consumption makes it a part of the driving force underneath modern American culture.”

If countries outside the U.S. were once able to maintain distance from its hyperlocal cultural events, that’s no longer the case today. Stars performing at the Super Bowl are “international” (read: hegemonic), as are the media channels covering it and the algorithms promoting it, pointing to the homogenization of mass culture at an unprecedented scale. If Rafah is bombed while the world looks at American excess and spectacle, it isn’t a coincidence. Just take former CIA official Allen Dulles’ word for it: “If we teach young people in the Soviet Union to sing our songs and dance with them, sooner or later we will teach them to think in the way we need them to.”