Like all great films, Argo accounts for various visions of which the most immediately understandable had to do with politics, derived — as it is known — from real events that occurred during the hostage crisis between Iran and the U.S. in 1979. A very accurate historical-political context, worked on down to the last detail of its reconstruction, and which can also be read and reviewed in light of current affairs nowadays, just like 1979, since there is increasing tension between Tehran and Washington today. Together with fluttering flags with the stars and stripes flags in the end, details (stated and implied) abound, especially in the first 20 minutes, of strong criticism of U.S. policy in the region — especially over the explicit support of the Reza Pahlavi regime.
Similarly, there is a fascinating, back-and-forth game established between U.S. policy and the politics of a 1970s Hollywood beaten by the crisis of the major studios, whose symbol is the famous— and then semi-destroyed — sign that the film showed from the air. One has to see how Ben Affleck handles that connection in symmetrical terms: At one point, film people — a real makeup artist and a fictitious producer — begin to become political and a group of hostages confined in the Canadian embassy in Tehran pretend to be part of team making a movie. Asserting itself in its historical time, Argo achieves the rare feat of immediately becoming a classic.
The summits are not endpoints. They are the mechanism by which two countries, which can neither resolve their differences nor afford to rupture them, manage the interval between crises.
The price of flippancy in the White House and the criminal intransigence of the Tehran regime is being paid by the Iranians who, after nearly half a century of cruel dictatorship, deserve to be free.
[O]il, CITGO and the control of gold remain the key pieces on a geopolitical chessboard, with the suffering of the Venezuelan people relegated to the background.