In September 2021, I was New York City’s Commissioner for International Affairs. It was UNGA week, and New York was still reopening from COVID. We were masked or meeting on rooftops, still trying to remember what it meant to be together again.
One of the delegations we hosted that week included seven young men who had just been appointed South Korea’s Special Presidential Envoys for Future Generations and Culture.
That morning, BTS spoke at the United Nations, with a jaw dropping million streams on YouTube.
That evening, they arrived at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I expected a diplomatic ceremony. What I witnessed was something more revealing.
The rooftop was all formal choreography: golden light, advance teams, museum trustees, government officials, helicopters overhead, Alex Da Corte’s towering blue Big Bird swaying above us. The energy was cautious. Everyone was still relearning how to gather. Then BTS walked in, and the vibe changed.
Sculptor Alex Da Corte’s Bright Blue Big Bird on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Rooftop
Penny Abeywardena
Not because they were famous.
Because they knew how to be there.
Their leader spoke without prepared remarks, in his second language, adjusting in real time to the sound, the mood, and the moment. He spoke about having visited the Met two years earlier as a tourist and now returning as a diplomat. He spoke about Korean culture becoming more visible to the world, and about how many Korean artists still had not been discovered.
What struck me was not celebrity crossing into diplomacy. It was something more useful than that: a group reading a space they did not control and making their presence count anyway.
That is a skill.
It is also one of the clearest examples of soft power I have ever seen up close.
At the time, I registered the moment but did not fully understand the system behind it. I knew they had reach. New York City’s official Twitter account posted a photo and the response was immediate (within an hour or two) and enormous: 70,000 likes, 26,000 retweets. But what stayed with me even more was what happened off the platform. My DM’s lit up from places far outside the normal orbit of city government. Sri Lanka. Brazil. People who had never engaged with anything I had done as Commissioner suddenly had. Not because of policy. Because I had been in proximity to BTS.
The reach stopped being abstract. It became personal.
Screenshot of NYC International Affairs post hours after BTS at the Met event.
Penny Abeywardena
The System Behind The Moment
I have been thinking about that evening again because BTS is back. After nearly four years away for mandatory military service, they returned this month with a free concert at Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Square that drew 260,000 people and streamed live on Netflix to 18.4 million viewers across more than 70 countries. Their new album, ARIRANG is named after the folk song Koreans consider their unofficial national anthem. An 82-date world tour launches in April.
And in January, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum sent a formal diplomatic letter to South Korea’s president asking him to help secure more BTS concert dates after a million fans competed for 150,000 tickets. Tickets had sold out in 37 minutes. Lee Jae-myung replied that the government could not dictate a touring schedule, but thanked Mexico for its deep affection for Korean culture. Sheinbaum posted his response on TikTok, because…she tried.
That is not a quirky entertainment story. It is a lesson in statecraft.
A head of state formally appealing to another head of state over concert access tells us something important about the kind of influence we are dealing with. Korea’s cultural reach is not decoration. It is infrastructure.
Influence Arrives Before You Do
This is the part many leaders still misunderstand about influence. They assume it begins at the moment of persuasion: the meeting, the pitch, the negotiation, the formal ask. But the most powerful influence starts long before that. It begins by making people familiar with you. Curious about you. Open to you. It builds affinity before leverage is ever required.
South Korea understood this before most countries did. For decades, it has treated culture as a strategic national asset, investing not only in what it produces but in the systems that help that culture travel: distribution networks, language education through institutions like the King Sejong Institute, and a multi-ministerial strategy integrating cultural exports with diplomacy and trade. The country’s cultural content exports exceeded $12 billion in 2023. It jumped three places in the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index in a single year. BTS alone contributes an estimated $5 billion annually to the South Korean economy. By the time a Korean delegation walks into a room in New York, Mexico City, or Jakarta, the groundwork may already have been laid by years of music, television, language study, fandom, and emotional familiarity.
The influence does not begin in the room.
It arrives there.
That is what I was seeing on the Met rooftop in 2021, even if I could not fully name it at the time. I was watching the output of a decades-long investment in cultural presence. I was watching what happens when a country’s soft power is not merely promoted but chosen by millions of people who feel connected to it before policy ever enters the picture.
A Netflix documentary released this month, BTS: The Return, makes this even clearer. Director Bao Nguyen follows the seven members as they reunite to record their first album in over five years. What he captures is not a victory lap. It is a negotiation: how Korean should this album be? How much traditional folk sampling is authentic versus performative? How do you honor the roots of your influence without being trapped by them? The members disagree with each other. They push back on their label. They debate whether lyrics written in English can carry the emotional weight of ideas they think and feel in Korean.
That tension between cultural specificity and global reach is not a music industry problem. It is the central negotiation of influence. Every leader, every institution trying to build trust across difference faces it: how do you stay specific enough to be credible and universal enough to connect?
BTS is back. But the more interesting story is that they were never just a band. They were, and are, proof of what becomes possible when culture does the work that policy alone cannot. And the skill I watched them deploy on that Met rooftop, the ability to read a room, hold tension, and make connection feel chosen rather than engineered, is the same skill that no technology has figured out how to replace.
Korea bet on that. The bet paid off.