Spider-Man: Far From Home Secretly Proves Tony Stark Learned Nothing
Iron Man: Professional idiot.
The entire thing about Tony Stark's arc up to Avengers: Endgame is that he's an obstinate fool whose blinkered approach to trying to protect his world is tearing him apart. He is an obsessive, driven only by being Iron Man and a requirement to make sure his friends and loved ones - and indeed everyone else - is safe from major, sometimes unknown universal threats.
That's not a criticism of him at all - in fact, it's something that makes him very endearing. He was a man who watched aliens attack, who was betrayed by his closest business partner and then his closest Avengers ally and who was forced to face up to his and his company's crimes multiple times. He was accosted for helping cause the death of innocents in Africa and in Sokovia and his poor running of Stark Industries (before he was kidnapped) led to the creation of the Twins. So it's no wonder he felt like he had red in his ledger.
The point for Tony was that he had to learn that he couldn't go to extremes to achieve his agenda. He had built the Iron Legion and Ultron as a means to remove human fallibility from Earth's defence. His dream was always to have impenetrable shields that would simply make the Avengers redundant and you have to think that part of that was the untold tragedy of him being unable to move on with his life if he always felt he had to be Iron Man.
Unfortunately, Tony also strayed into the kind of extremist thinking that twisted Thanos' morality and made him believe that his quest to kill half of the universe was the only way to save it from itself. After all, Thanos was a dark mirror of Tony, just as Obadiah Stane, Aldrich Killian and Justin Hammer all were. He was very much another "there but by the grace of God go I" sort of figures for Tony and marked him as such himself when he said "you and I are cursed by knowledge."
So, it was a fitting end for Tony that he eventually realised that an extremist approach was not what was necessary to save the world. In the end, he WAS the one to lay down on the wire, sacrificing himself to stop Thanos. And this coming after a period of him seemingly not wanting to be Iron Man any more and living in peace seemed to suggest some personal growth. Almost as if defeat had given him the life he always needed and couldn't have.
Or at least that's how it looked before Far From Home came out and changed everything again.
Because, quite frankly, that film undoes one of the most fitting parts of Tony Stark's arc. We'd watched him for most of a decade being forced to learn that he couldn't hope to put a safety blanket around the world and yet Far From Home revealed that he had still done it anyway. And once more, unsurprisingly, it had backfired.
Far From Home walks back some of Tony's epiphany by revealing that he had built a drone system called EDITH (Even Dead I'm The Hero) at some point with the intention of passing it on to "the next Iron Man." And just as Ultron turned bad, naturally EDITH falls into a bad guy's hands and becomes the very thing that threatens the world. Just as you'd have predicted it would have if literally anyone had brought up the fact that Tony Stark had secretly developed an army of murder-bots that could be summoned to Earth at any point.
The big lovely idiot.
It's almost like there's some unseen commentary here that suggests that the world is doomed to live in a cycle of potential doom as long as good men keep trying their best to protect it. As long as the Avengers exist to save the world, or SHIELD or pretty much anything, they can be corrupted or their actions can unwittingly corrupt others and inspire them to villainy.
So maybe Thanos WAS right and the only way to save everyone is to wipe it all clean and start again?