A reader wisely points out that Iron Man / Tony Stark has always been conservative, so I shouldn’t have used the character as a shorthand for Robert Downey Jr.

Not being a comics guy, I don’t actually know much about this. But I found this post at the Liberty Film Festival website:

The original Iron Man books, like all of the Marvel comic books of the early-mid 60s, are extremely conservative. The United States is always representative of positive virtues, and the enemies are almost entirely communists from “Red China” or the Soviet Union. It’s lovable cold war propaganda – the commies are depicted in very derogatory racial carciatures, etc.
His origin isn’t some “nameless” Asian country – it’s Vietnam, which is pretty incredible considering the 1963 date it was published. He creates the armor to save his own life (basically creating a pacemaker to keep his heart going and prevent shrapnel from entering it(!), but Tony Stark’s sole goal after that is to build weapons to fight the commies. In one early comic, he unveils a disintegrator ray, which he boldly proclaims could be used to wipe out Commie battleships or even cities (!). Ah, the days when the entertainment industry realized we were at war.

Let’s hope the film lives up to the vision of the original, then.