The history of both nations makes the complex explicable; their fates seem uniquely intertwined. Until 6 January 2021, the British were the last invaders of the US Capitol; tourists can still observe the burn marks left from 1814. The War of 1812 gave America its national anthem. London’s decision not to back the Confederacy in the US Civil War (1861–65) was crucial to the victory of the North. From 1917 to 1941 (‘late’ by two years on both occasions), American force was crucial in winning world wars that Britain had declared. The US refusal to support Anglo–French attempts to reclaim the Suez Canal (in 1956) was the final nail in the British Empire’s coffin. The ensuing British decision to steer clear of Vietnam in the 1960s significantly compromised America’s war there. Despite the apparent alliance between both nations in the Cold War, Washington was a key catalyst of the decolonisation of British Africa and Asia. Since the Cold War, America has not fought without British support.

These remarkable peaks and troughs of the special relationship form the backdrop of Buruma’s account. His particular focus is on the twenty-six men and two women (thirteen US presidents and fifteen British prime ministers) who have run this relationship since 1940. Because the author’s approach is essentially personal, the book is rich in anecdotes, though few are newly unearthed here. He speculates that Harold Macmillan, ‘who had probably not had sex for years’, was both bemused and impressed by John Kennedy’s claim that ‘going without sex for more than three days gave him a headache’. Lyndon Johnson, despite his own philandering, took a dim view of Harold Wilson for his alleged affair with his secretary, Marcia Williams. LBJ was far warmer toward Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt, whose pledge to go ‘all the way with LBJ’ in Vietnam was as great an expression of the Churchill complex as any Buruma documents here.

Buruma has an ongoing axe to grind over Brexit, the 2016 referendum decision to leave the European Union. He sees it as the most recent manifestation of the Churchill complex, not because Churchill himself was opposed to the European project, but because it rested on the false assumption that Britain could be a global player with the United States in its corner. But, prior to Donald Trump, every president wanted a deepening of the European project, not a British exit from it.

This did not prevent Tony Blair, despite being an ardent European Unionist, from making common cause, not with Brussels but with Washington. His legacy is the Kosovo War (1999), fought alongside Bill Clinton, and the Iraq War (2003), modelled on Anglo–American success in Kosovo and waged in alliance with George W. Bush. Observe, says Buruma, how even the British leaders who have embraced the EU have prioritised, mostly for romantic reasons, the US alliance. While this initially led to victory over fascist Germany and Japan, followed by the demise of the USSR, it ended in Trumpist isolation, Brexit, and the disaster of the Iraqi occupation.

By thinking themselves Churchillian, pretty much every prime minister, Labour or Conservative, has helped degrade the very thing they believed themselves to be sustaining. Each British leader imbibed some notion that Churchill was the model to follow. Buruma argues persuasively that even Churchill suffered from the Churchill complex, overegging his friendship with Franklin Roosevelt, and ignoring the president’s explicit agenda to roll back the British Empire. Ditto Anthony Eden, who failed to read Eisenhower’s steely intransigence over Egypt. Jimmy Carter disliked Margaret Thatcher ‘at first sight’. Despite sharing humble origins, Edward Heath could not stand Richard Nixon and vice versa.

However, it is arguable that the Heath–Nixon relationship (1970–74), despite Buruma’s claims, highlights not the intensity of the Churchill complex but its significant weakening. Heath did not romanticise the special relationship. On the contrary, he sought its replacement by a UK firmly embedded within the European Community. This had echoes of Wilson’s refusal to support LBJ in Vietnam. Surely the Churchill complex would have compelled a pro-US orientation on both British leaders? The Thatcher–Reagan duo (1981–89) was, chides Buruma, all ‘Churchill, kinship, and freedom’, but this was surely a highpoint in the utility of the special relationship. The Soviet Union survived it by only a few years. More recently, in 2013, the British refusal to support any US action in Syria makes the author’s assertion of an enduring and debilitating complex problematic.

The book works better as an accessible and readable history of the special relationship than it does as a sustained argument about a loosely defined and hard to measure ‘Churchill complex’. Sometimes the complex is apparent and sheds light. On other occasions, it seems tangential to the explanations Buruma offers, if not contradictory. The personal portraits are fascinating, but the realist reader wants them better related to the structures of international diplomacy and the imperatives imposed by power politics. Does the suggestion of a psychological complex help us navigate those?

The obvious comparison to test Buruma’s thesis would be the Australian–American alliance. Every Australian prime minister since 1945, Labor or Liberal, has given priority to the relationship with Washington. With British power in eclipse, Canberra moved swiftly into the bosom of US protection, all the while romanticising the Anglo-Saxon values underpinning this insurance policy: pay the premiums and hope that when a claim is made by Canberra, Washington will honour it. But neither the Lodge nor Kirribilli House rates a mention. On ANZUS, informed by a nostalgia not unlike the Churchill complex, the author is silent. In a book dedicated to a special relationship, there might have been scope to compare it with another. There are arguably no two nations in the world more attuned to one another than the United States and Australia, none more instinctively aligned and effortlessly fraternal – and thus subject to the same psychoses and delusions that the author claims ruined the Anglo-American special relationship.