#but then... arguing in favour of... global government oversight (so a... world security council then

[amarriageoftrueminds]

To me, this reads as if Tony’s drive is not guilt... it’s fear. The Existential Horror of discovering that bad things can happen to even a sheltered billionaire genius Great Man such as himself. 

His bruised ego over his tarnished legacy and his fondness for dramatics has him wanting to whitewash his past and cocoon his future with a single grand gesture. But he wants the easy, comforting, short cut. So he will, eg. kill everyone in Novi Grad, so long as it will quickly save his planet. 

(His controlling tendencies only extend beyond America to encompass the whole planet because armouring himself alone won’t keep him safe. And that panic has him making the same authoritarian choices that Hydra believes in; PTSD radicalises him.) 

Tony’s fear makes him paranoid that the Avengers will fail (even though it’s the World Security Council and his own Ultron that fail). 

Which... is what causes him to interfere with a winning formula, and unwittingly bring about the very failure he so feared. 

His drive is not making amends but behaving differently (ish), because the way he behaved before backfired and caused him pain, and he’s just desperately trying to avoid experiencing more. 

Including the pain of being confronted by a dead kid’s parent. He didn’t care about dead kids in Sokovia until a grieving American parent made him personally feel bad about it. He wants someone else to be the one who experiences that pain; he wants someone else to be to blame if things go wrong. 

Because, to a narcissist, there is no greater agony than publicly fucking up.

Tony has a very legitimate argument in the movie that’s a very adult point of view, about culpability, about the Avengers’ responsibility to the world, and the world’s right to have some sort of control over the Avengers. - Joe Russo