Owen Harries

Background

Harries was born in Wales in 1930 and educated at Oxford University, where his tutor was political theorist John Plamenatz and lecturer was philosopher Isaiah Berlin. After he spent two years in the Royal Air Force in the early 1950s, he and his wife Dorothy moved to Sydney. From 1955 to 1975, he was a senior lecturer in government at the University of Sydney and then an associate professor of politics at the University of New South Wales.

From 1976 to 1983, he served the Australian centre-right coalition government of prime minister Malcolm Fraser in several senior posts, including head of policy planning in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, senior adviser to both Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock and Malcolm Fraser as well as Australian Ambassador to UNESCO in Paris.

During this period, he was widely credited for principally drafting Australia’s foreign policy in the post-Vietnam period as well as shaping and articulating the conservative and liberal ideas which formed the philosophical basis of the then Liberal government.

After the defeat of the Fraser government in 1983, he moved to Washington, DC, where he served as senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He played a leading role in encouraging the Reagan administration to withdraw from UNESCO.

The National Interest (1985-2001)

He was co-founder (with Irving Kristol) and co-editor (with Irving Kristol) of The National Interest, a Washington-based foreign policy magazine, which they turned into one of America’s most influential political publications. Over the years, they published famous essays by among other authors Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger, Fareed Zakaria and his long-time friend and publisher Irving Kristol. According to The Bulletin, during his co-editorship from 1985 to 2001 he was "known as probably the most famous Australian in Washington".

Since his return to Sydney in 2001, Harries has remained editor emeritus at The National Interest while he serves as an editorial board member of The American Interest magazine in Washington, DC. He has been a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies as well as a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. In recent years, he has collaborated with the Australian conservative writer Tom Switzer (1).

Ideas and writings

Harries is widely praised as a prolific writer and compelling conversationalist whose long journey from Wales to Sydney has brought him global eminence as an elder statesman of international relations. His success and influence stem from the same source – realism, a foreign policy school of thought he first learned in the 1950s and then thoroughly absorbed while teaching at university, serving in government and editing a magazine.

For much of his career, he has been a major player in policy debates, especially US-Australia relations. While being among the strongest supporters of the US-Australia alliance, he has not shied away from criticism of the US. In the 1960s, he was a prominent supporter of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Four decades later, he was a trenchant critic of the Iraq War, the leading intellectual architects of that war, and Australia’s involvement in it. In the heat of the Iraq debate, he delivered the ABC’s Boyer Lectures, which have been published under the title.

Harries was a member of the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, a group that produced Quadrant magazine, on whose editorial board he sat. Over the years, he has edited and contributed to several books on culture, politics and international relations. He has also been a regular contributor to several newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Times, as well as magazines Commentary, Foreign Affairs, National Review and The New Republic.

In 2011, Harries was presented for admission to the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) at the University of Sydney.

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