Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Trump and Brexit Killed Winston Churchill's Ghost

A Q&A with Ian Buruma on the state of the “special relationship” between the U.S. and the U.K.

September 12, 2020 at 12:00 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

That really was something special.
Source: Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images

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How special is the Special Relationship? The idea that the U.K. and the U.S. share a unique bond among nations makes for excellent metaphors — as colonial mother and revolutionary child; of classical Greece and the Roman Empire; of two nations divided by a common language. But has it ever really meant anything?

The answer is a qualified yes. And while President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously played up the idea to their geopolitical advantages, theirs was mostly an alliance of convenience. If the relationship was ever special, it was really just between two men: President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Now in those roles, we have Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. (Confirming, perhaps, the maxim than every nation gets the government it deserves.) To make sense of things, I sought out one of my favorite polymaths, Ian Buruma. Buruma, a professor of human rights and journalism at Bard College, has written many books, especially about Asia. His latest is, “The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, from Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit.” Here is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation: