Air Imperialism: How Michael Jordan Became the Planet’s Most Efficient Export (and Never Needed a Passport)

Michael Jordan Doesn’t Do Borders, but Borders Do Him
Bylines from Belgrade to Beijing still tremble when the man’s silhouette appears on a screen—like a Rorschach test for late-stage capitalism. Thirty-plus years after he first levitated from the free-throw line, His Airness remains the planet’s most efficiently exported American: more durable than democracy, lighter to ship than a Tomahawk missile, and—crucially—available in children’s sizes.

In Nairobi night markets, counterfeit Jordan 1s sell next to bootleg solar panels and discounted antibiotics. The shoes arrive smelling of Guangdong glue, yet the Jumpman logo carries more street cred than a blue passport. From Lagos barbershops to Manila jeepneys, the shorthand is the same: wear the shoes, inherit the myth. No one needs the NBA League Pass to grasp the narrative—poor kid, tongue out, gravity mocked, corporate ascent—because Nike’s marketing department long ago transcended mere sport and became its own Department of State.

Consider the soft-power ledger. The 1992 Barcelona Olympics—aka the Dream Team’s victory lap—coincided with the first McDonald’s opening in Warsaw. Coincidence? Sure, and Chernobyl was just a steam leak. While Soviet statues were being yanked down across Eastern Europe, Jordan posters slid smoothly into the vacant wall space, a sneaker-clad St. George slaying the dragon of drab utilitarianism. One Chicago Bull did more for Western retail penetration than all the Voice of America broadcasts combined, proving that the most persuasive ideology is the kind you can lace up.

Meanwhile, China spent the 1990s perfecting the art of the knockoff, turning the southern province of Fujian into a parallel-universe Nike R&D lab. Today, Yeezys may trend on Weibo, but Jordan remains the elder statesman of aspiration—proof that if you counterfeit something long enough, it becomes folk culture. Beijing even tolerates the underground sneaker museums, so long as the captions avoid Tiananmen and stick to tongue-twisting colorways like “Bred” and “Royal.” Every authoritarian regime reaches a point where it must decide which fantasies to ban and which to tax; the Jumpman, wisely, got taxed.

Europe, ever the critic with a mouthful of artisanal cheese, pretends to be above this sort of thing. Then you watch Parisian teens camping outside Foot Locker in the rain, shivering for a retro pair like medieval pilgrims seeking bone fragments. Ask them why and they’ll cite “culture,” a word Europeans use when they can’t admit they’re just as thirsty as everyone else. Jordan, to his credit, never claimed to be culture; he simply sold it by the box, shrink-wrapped.

The global south, meanwhile, has turned resale into remittance. A kid in Santo Domingo who cops a limited drop can flip it to a collector in Dubai for triple rent. Whole Discord economies now orbit around release calendars the way small nations once scheduled harvests. Call it post-colonial diversification: when the IMF won’t answer the phone, maybe the SNKRS app will.

And yet, for all the triumphalism, there’s a quiet, almost charming futility to owning a pair of 1985 originals in 2024. Each step risks sole separation; each flex courts existential dread. The shoes, like their namesake, were built for vertical takeoff, not horizontal trudging through inflation, war, and algorithmic despair. Wear them on a cracked Beirut sidewalk and you’re reminded that gravity always collects its debts—usually with interest.

Jordan himself long ago retired to a private golf purgatory, occasionally emerging to remind us he’s still the most competitive billionaire in the room. He’ll gamble on a hurricane if you spot him two strokes, then stare you down like it’s Game 7 of the apocalypse. Some call it psychosis; others call it brand consistency. Either way, the rest of us keep lacing up, convinced the next pair might finally let us levitate above the daily rubble of geopolitics.

So here we are: a world where a 61-year-old man who hasn’t played a meaningful game in two decades still dictates sneaker riots from his cigar-clouded study. If that isn’t a metaphor for America’s current export portfolio—nostalgia wrapped in leather, delivered with a snarl—then I’ve been filing from the wrong hemisphere. The Jumpman hangs in the air, frozen, while down below we scurry like ants under a magnifying glass held by a very rich, very bored deity.

He doesn’t need to play anymore; the game plays us. And the score, as always, is 23–0.