Do the right thing: Cooling a world on edge

In Spike Lee’s classic film ‘Do the Right Thing,’ a Brooklyn summer distills human folly. A pizzeria’s wall, a loud radio, a sharp word: these are not the fire, merely sparks. The blaze — Radio Raheem’s death and the riot — springs from deeper sores of race, money, history’s long shadow. No one pauses, no one listens, and the street burns. It is 1989, but it could be 2025. From Donald Trump’s tariff gambit to the blood in Kashmir’s Pahalgam valley, the world teeters on the edge of unraveling. The lesson is old, and we still ignore it: pride is a poor strategist.

Consider Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, a 145 percent levy on Chinese goods, countered by Beijing’s 125 percent response. This isn’t just about trade deficits ($323 billion in 2018, barely shifted since) or intellectual property theft; it’s a clash of visions — America’s waning primacy against China’s patient ascent. Both sides are entrenched, each casting the other as the villain. The interconnectedness of 2025’s world makes such recklessness costlier than ever before. China’s supply chains span across Asia, Africa, and Europe. America’s consumers prop up half the globe’s markets. A tariff war is not a duel but a brawl, spilling over borders. Yet Trump, ever the showman, frames it as patriotism, while Xi, ever the chess player, bets on endurance. Both risk misjudging the fragility of a world wired so tightly that a sneeze in Washington can bankrupt a shop in Jakarta.

Half a world away, the April 22 Pahalgam attack— in which 26 tourists were killed by a Lashkar-e-Taiba splinter group— has transformed a Himalayan idyll into a geopolitical flashpoint. India points to Pakistan; Pakistan, as ever, deflects. The tinder isn’t one atrocity but Kashmir’s decades-long grief. India’s response has been fierce but blunt: suspending the Indus Waters Treaty (a 1960 pact that irrigates Pakistan’s fields), shutting the Attari-Wagah border, and downgrading diplomatic ties. These are not surgical strikes; they are sledgehammers, risking mass disruption.

April’s heat— Trump’s bombast, Indian and Pakistani leaders’ bluster, the blood in Pahalgam— has brought them to a boil.

Javed Hassan

 Pakistan has retaliated in kind: scaling down India’s embassy, closing its airspace to Indian-owned and operated airlines, and suspending all trade with India. Most ominously, it has warned that “any attempt to stop or divert the flow of water belonging to Pakistan under the Indus Waters Treaty...will be considered an Act of War and met with full force across the complete spectrum of national power.”

Pakistan’s General Asim Munir calls Kashmir his nation’s jugular vein. India’s rhetoric, laced with ‘surgical’ bravado, raises the stakes. Hussain Nadim, a professor at George Washington University, writes on X that India craves a “spectacular” retaliation, not mere deterrence. Pakistan, he notes, is cornered— its economy frail, its politics brittle. India’s treaty suspension fits Nadim’s warning, but it risks pushing a desperate foe to miscalculate. A stray missile or border skirmish could now tip the subcontinent toward the unthinkable.

Though worlds apart, these crises follow a pattern: systemic grievances, inflamed by immediate triggers, explode under pressure. In Lee’s Brooklyn, it’s racial and economic divides; in Washington and Beijing, its rival ambitions; in South Asia, it’s the partition wounds. April’s heat— Trump’s bombast, Indian and Pakistani leaders’ bluster, the blood in Pahalgam— has brought them to a boil.

What links Brooklyn, Beijing, and Pahalgam is the refusal to step back. Lee’s film shows how fast things unravel when pride trumps sense. Today, the stakes are higher: economic ruin, nuclear brinkmanship. What, then, is the right thing? In Do the Right Thing, it’s ambiguous— Mookie’s trashcan thrown, Sal’s shattered storefront— but it starts with listening, stepping back, choosing restraint over reflex.

For Washington and Beijing, it means negotiations, not showdowns. A tariff truce, even temporary, could cool markets and preserve interdependence. China buys almost $200 billion in US goods and services annually; decoupling hurts both. The WTO, imperfect but neutral, could mediate. Leaders must prioritize citizens— American consumers, Chinese workers— over nationalist bravado.

For India and Pakistan, the stakes are existential. India’s rage is understandable, but its reprisals are high-risk. Pakistan must condemn the attack unequivocally, not deflect. Both must silence the war drums – Pakistan’s reassertion of the “jugular vein” and India’s “surgical strikes” rhetoric are gasoline. The US, despite its India tilt, could broker backchannels, as post-Kargil. China, Pakistan’s ally, must press Islamabad not to equivocate. Kashmir’s people, not its borders, need focus: tourism, gutted by the attack, was their lifeline.

For the rest of us, the right thing is to demand better. Social media amplifies Trump’s tariffs and India’s outrage, but it mustn’t drown reason. Lee’s film ends with Martin Luther King Jr. advocating peace, Malcolm X urging defiance. The choice isn’t binary. Restraint isn’t weakness; it’s survival. April 2025 warns us how close we are to repeating Lee’s tragedy on a global stage.

Leaders, citizens, all of us, must feel the heat and act. Cool the fever. Talk. Listen. Live.

– Javed Hassan has worked in senior executive positions both in the profit and non-profit sector in Pakistan and internationally. He’s an investment banker by training. X: @javedhassan