Owen Harries

Owen Harries is a Visiting Fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, and editor emeritus of The National Interest, a neoconservative Washington-based foreign policy quarterly (he was editor in chief from its founding in 1985 until 2001). Mr Harries is also on the International Advisory Board for the New Atlantic Initiative which is headquartered at the American Enterprise Institute.

In the late 1970s he was head of policy planning in the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, and senior adviser, successively, to the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Andrew Peacock) and the Prime Minister (Malcolm Fraser). In 1978-9 he was Chairman of the Committee on Australia's Relations with the Third World. During 1982-83 he was Australian Ambassador to UNESCO. In 1983-85 he was a fellow at the Heritage Foundation. 

He delivered the 2003 Boyer Lectures for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and they have been published under the title ''Benign or Imperial? Reflections on American Hegemony''.