The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit.
Ian Buruma.
Penguin Press. 2020.
ISBN: 9780525522201.

The Churchill Complex is a sharp, readable history of the Anglo-American special relationship, arguing that it has often been more myth than equal partnership. Buruma’s central claim is that Winston Churchill helped popularise the idea of a close, quasi-familial bond between Britain and the United States, but that Britain has usually placed far more faith in it than America ever did. Buruma treats the Churchill complex as the habit of invoking Churchill as a symbol of courage, freedom, and moral clarity, especially in political moments when leaders want to justify hard-line policies. He suggests that this Churchill worship has sometimes distorted history and encouraged bad judgment, especially when leaders on both sides of the Atlantic use World War II analogies too freely. The book also argues that the relationship was shaped less by sentiment than by power: Britain wanted relevance after empire, while the U.S. usually saw the alliance as useful but secondary.

Ian Buruma is a Dutch-born writer, journalist, and editor, born in The Hague in 1951. He has written widely on Asian culture, especially China and Japan, as well as politics, religion, and the aftermath of World War II. Buruma has taught at Bard College in New York and served as editor of The New York Review of Books from 2017 to 2018.
He was educated in the Netherlands and Japan, where he studied Chinese literature and Japanese cinema, and later worked as a journalist and cultural commentator. He received the Erasmus Prize in 2008 for his contribution to European culture.