Iron Man, and the Anticipations of a Long Unipolar Moment

In the early part of Iron Man 2 the film presents, in mocking fashion, the efforts of foreign countries to create their own Iron Man-style superweapon suit--specifically depicting the "North Korean" and "Iranian" efforts.

I suppose few gave this much thought at the time, or have given it much thought since, but it is a reminder of the different world people then imagined to exist geopolitically, with the "defense intellectuals" still fixated on terrorism and "rogue states" as any conflict with a "bigger opponent" still seemed remote. Granted, Tony Stark does face a Russian opponent in the movie, but this is old baggage, and at least in any surface way not even proper Cold War baggage but rather a matter of the son of a disgruntled Stark Industries employee out for revenge, instead of present-day geopolitics--while in the follow-up, Iron Man 3, the original comic book's longtime Chinese villain The Mandarin was actually "deSinified," in a movie coproduced by Marvel with China's DMG Entertainment, partially shot in China, and not only released in China but for which the producers made a special cut with added content (including prominent Chinese actors) to increase the interest of Chinese moviegoers in the movie (quite successfully, the movie taking in a then-very respectable $121 million in that market).

All that seems to belong to a different era geopolitically, even if Hollywood for the time being acknowledges this mainly in an oblique way--with it seeming symbolic that Iron Man star Robert Downey Jr. won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his turn as Leo Strauss in Oppenheimer, which, however much the true idiots of the media commentariat would prefer to see it as a parable about artificial intelligence, is a reminder that the nuclear danger never vanished from our world, and if anything is hideously resurgent in our times (a point about which Christopher Nolan himself was explicit in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, admittedly not a publication our entertainment press reads, or to which the more prominent talking-heads-with-no-brains-in-them pay attention).

In most ways this seems to me to reflect a turn for the worse and not the better--all as the suddenness with which it happened has been a reflection of the profound delusion of an elite persuaded that, among much else, both the tech boom and globalization would go on forever.