Owen Harries

Owen Harries (born March 1930) is a leading Australian foreign-policy intellectual and founding editor of The National Interest magazine in Washington, DC.

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.

He was founder and editor of The National Interest, a Washington-based foreign policy magazine, which he turned into one of America’s most influential political publications. Over the years, he 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 editorship from 1985 to 2001 he was "known as probably the most famous Australian in Washington".

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