How Dwayne Johnson Accidentally Became the UN Secretary-General of Pop Culture

Dwayne Johnson and the Globalization of Biceps: How One Man’s Pectorals Became a Soft-Power Asset

By the time the sun rose over the Sea of Marmara last week, a Turkish meme account had already Photoshopped Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s face onto the body of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, captioning it “The Father of All Nations—Now With 30% More Whey.” Thirty-three thousand likes later, Greek trolls replied by grafting the same grinning mandible onto a Spartan hoplite. Somewhere in a windowless EU monitoring cell in Brussels, a junior analyst sighed, logged the incident under “cross-border cultural diffusion,” and wondered why graduate school never covered the geostrategic implications of delts.

Welcome to the 21st-century order, where the most successful Samoan-Black Nova Scotian ex-wrestler on earth moonlights as an accidental export commodity. Johnson’s films gross more overseas than in North America; his tequila brand, Teremana, now ships to 42 countries; and his Under Armour shoes are stitched in Vietnam, marketed in Dubai, and hawked by influencers from Lagos to Lima. The man is less a celebrity than a low-orbit satellite, beaming motivational eyebrow raises to every corner of the planet with better bandwidth than half the UN’s development programs.

It’s tempting to dismiss this as another triumph of American cultural imperialism—Uncle Sam doing push-ups in a gym mirror. Yet Johnson’s appeal is weirder, more symbiotic. In India, multiplex audiences cheer when he punches an earthquake in “San Andreas” because the metaphor—man versus indifferent tectonics—maps neatly onto their own daily infrastructure negotiations. In Brazil, favela kids repost his workout clips as aspirational resistance against a government that keeps forgetting to pave their streets. Even the Chinese censors, who usually treat imported musculature like ideological cholesterol, granted “Rampage” a generous release window, presumably deciding that a genetically edited gorilla smashing Chicago was less politically sensitive than, say, Winnie-the-Pooh.

Meanwhile, Johnson’s off-screen persona—half Tony Robbins, half human protein shake—has become the planet’s most portable parable about self-invention. The story writes itself: broke college football washout becomes wrestler, becomes box-office insurance policy, becomes tequila tycoon, becomes maybe-president-if-the-polls-keep-drifting. It’s the sort of narrative that plays equally well in Lagos traffic jams and Warsaw co-working spaces because it sidesteps messy questions about inherited wealth, colonial extraction, or structural racism. Just add discipline, 5 a.m. alarms, and a barrel of creatine; shake until delirious.

The cynic (hello) notes that this fable dovetails suspiciously with late-capitalist meritocracy myths. While Johnson flies private to film reshoots in Atlanta, the cobalt miners of the Democratic Republic of Congo—whose ore powers the phones broadcasting his Instagram workouts—earn roughly one Johnson-per-minute per year. Somewhere, a marketing intern drafts a #Gratitude post to smooth over the irony. The algorithm approves.

Still, the man wields soft power like a kettlebell. When he pledged to stop using real fur in his Project Rock line after a single Change.org petition from Scandinavian teens, the announcement trended in four languages within an hour. Compare that to the months it took the actual Norwegian parliament to phase out fur subsidies. The lesson? Abs are faster than democracy, especially on fiber-optic timelines.

And so we arrive at 2024’s most surreal subplot: the slow-motion flirtation between Johnson and the American electorate. Pollsters claim he could siphon votes from both parties, a prospect that terrifies Beltway consultants who suddenly realize their spreadsheets never accounted for charisma calibrated in kilograms. Abroad, allies wonder whether a hypothetical President Rock would greet NATO leaders with the People’s Eyebrow or simply rename the alliance “Team Bring It.” Either option feels on-brand.

In the end, perhaps the global takeaway is simpler. While diplomats draft communiqués nobody reads and trade ministers argue over tariffs destined to be circumvented by teenagers on TikTok, one smiling man with a bull tattoo and a Costco-scale work ethic has already built the only functioning world government we’ve got: 350 million followers, universal translator included, running on nothing more than sweat, sequels, and the collective hope that somewhere, somehow, the biceps are real.

Sleep tight, planet Earth. The Rock is watching—and he’s leg-day consistent.