interview On Prudence and Restraint in Foreign Policy Susan Windybank talks to Owen Harries wen Harries was, until July 2001, the founding to Right. In a profile of you published in The Bulletin Editor-in-Chief of the influential, Washington- in 1984, you were described as a ‘left-wing Laborite’ Obased, foreign policy journal, The National who became a ‘star in the American right’. When did Interest. The journal rose to mainstream prominence with you begin to change? the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘The End of History?’ in the summer of 1989, although it was no OH: You must remember that I grew up in a South stranger to spirited debate—in the very first issue, Harries Wales mining valley during the Depression, in a place ran an article by publisher Irving Kristol dismissing the that at one point had an unemployment level of 57%. very concept of ‘national interest’ as ‘dead beyond I don’t think I saw a live conservative for the first 20 resurrection’. years of my life. It was only after I came to Australia to Born in Wales, and educated at the University of Wales take up a teaching position in adult education at the and Oxford, Harries taught at both the University of Department of Tutorial Studies at Sydney University Sydney and New South Wales, before becoming Senior that I really started moving away from a leftist position. Advisor to shadow Foreign Affairs Minister, Andrew I had Harry Eddy on one side and Esmond Higgins, Peacock, in 1974. He then successively became head of who was an ex-leading member of the Australian policy planning in the Department of Foreign Affairs, Communist Party, on the other. In a small department, and Senior Advisor to former Prime Minister Malcolm I was a new factor that was fought over, so to speak. Fraser. The director and co-author of an influential study of Australia’s relations with the Third World, dubbed ‘The SW: Who ended up converting you? Harries Report’, he was appointed Australian Ambassador to UNESCO in 1982. He then joined leading US think OH: I think largely myself, though Harry Eddy was tank, The Heritage Foundation, as a Visiting Fellow, before certainly influential. He was an ex-Trotskyist who had founding The National Interest in 1985. moved away to become a very strong anti-communist. Once described as a ‘man who enjoys talk the way He was polemically very powerful and he just out-argued others enjoy football’, Owen Harries recently returned to me. At least I had the sense to realise I was being out- Australia. He is now a Senior Fellow at The Centre for argued, and I started to shift. Independent Studies. He remains Consulting Editor and Editor Emeritus of The National Interest. SW: Despite this shift, you voted for Whitlam in 1972. What was it that attracted you to Whitlam? SW: Given that this issue of Policy contains several articles exploring the use—and misuse—of labels, I would like to begin by discussing your shift from Left Susan Windybank is Editor of Policy. Autumn 2002 27 ON PRUDENCE AND RESTRAINT IN FOREIGN POLICY OH: It was more push than pull. It was the push of Calvert, who is currently head of the department, wrote Billy McMahon. I felt it was impossible to vote for him. some chapters in it. Des Moore was influential on the The Liberals had a very bad spell. They were split economic side. It was a very good, very enjoyable year. internally. Gorton had been a mixed bag, and We worked intensely. It involved interviewing McMahon was really bad. At that time I was running a extensively, and sorting out internally on the committee. television programme on Channel Nine and I was We only had one member who dissented. Everything interviewing people every week. One week I interviewed else we managed to resolve without smoothing it all Gough and at the end of the programme in the makeup out into a bland custard. room I told him that at the next election I was going to vote for him. And he said, ‘Well, Owen, if you’re going SW: You went on to become Senior Advisor to Malcolm to vote for me, I’m going to win.’ Fraser, before accepting the post of Australian Ambassador to UNESCO. How long were you at SW: Within a few years of voting for Whitlam you were UNESCO? advising shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs, Andrew Peacock, before becoming head of policy planning in OH: I was at UNESCO for about a year and a half. I the Department of Foreign Affairs. During that time, went there at the beginning of 1982, but then Malcolm you largely wrote the Report of the Fraser lost the election in 1983. As a Committee on Australia’s Relations political appointee I was required to with the Third World, which became submit my resignation, and the Labor widely known as ‘the Harries report’. I spent a very Party wanted to find somewhere for Why did the government feel that such happy year and Gough Whitlam to get him out of a report was needed, and what was the Australia. So I offered my resignation, reaction to it? a half getting it was accepted, and I left. And then it America and was a question of what I was going to OH: You must remember that from Britain to do. I didn’t particularly want to go back 1973, when OPEC made its first move and teach at the University of New and forced up the price of oil, when withdraw from South Wales. I had already become America was very much on the defensive UNESCO. pretty disillusioned at what was after Vietnam and Watergate, the Third happening to universities, so some World was at its most militant. It was friends suggested I went to riding high, it was exerting a lot of pressure on the West, Washington. I joined a think tank there, the Heritage and in those circumstances, it was felt—by Peacock and Foundation, where I spent a very happy year and a half Fraser—that Australia was particularly vulnerable as a getting America and Britain to withdraw from sort of outpost of the West with a lot of Third World UNESCO. neighbours. It was rightly felt that we needed to give serious consideration to what all this meant. SW: On what grounds? As for the reaction to it, it was very favourable, though not uniformly so. There were some attacks on OH: That under its director general, M’Bow, it was it from the Left, but by and large it got a very good corrupt, that it was grossly inefficient, and that it was press indeed. It was pointed out that this was the first grossly anti-Western. America and Britain were paying time that a report like this, a serious intellectual report, to get their values undermined and attacked. Even by had been produced by an Australian government on UN standards, UNESCO was pretty outrageous, and I the question of foreign policy. The British Foreign Office always argued that even those who believed in the UN was very interested in it, and I conducted a seminar on should have wanted to criticise and attack UNESCO it for them in London. The Japanese seriously thought because it was giving the UN a bad name. of translating it into Japanese. So it was pretty much a success. Let me emphasise that while I chaired it, and wrote ON PRUDENCE AND RESTRAINT something like over half of it, there were a lot of other important contributions from other people. Ashton SW: How would you describe yourself now? 28 Policy vol. 18, no. 1 ON PRUDENCE AND RESTRAINT IN FOREIGN POLICY OH: I would describe myself as a conservative. New Order, to impose its will on the world, to promote democracy very actively. SW: What’s the difference between a neoconservative Now I had two serious objections to this. One was and a conservative? that it is not doable. Democracy is not an export commodity. It’s much more a do-it-yourself project. OH: Irving Kristol famously described a neoconservative Americans should have realised this because for several as a liberal who’d been mugged by reality, and I guess generations they had been using their influence in the there’s an element of that. But I think I became Carribbean and Central America, right next door to increasingly aware that, as compared with a lot of the them and with very small countries, and even there they neoconservatives that I worked amongst and that I had couldn’t do it. So why they thought they could do it as colleagues and friends in America, my position tended elsewhere in the world was a bit mysterious. Also, I more towards what you might call classical don’t think the United States is particularly good at conservatism. After the Cold War ended, a lot of the understanding other cultures and other societies. neoconservatives reverted to their liberalism, particularly The other thread of the argument is that if you are in foreign policy, whereas I didn’t. In the sole remaining superpower, you fact, conditions after the Cold War should be very careful and restrained tended to strengthen my realist, in the use of your power. As anyone conservative approach to foreign policy. Democracy is who has studied international history I think I spent most of the 1990s not an export and politics knows, the fate of arguing not against the Left but against dominant powers that are very active the neoconservatives, arguing for commodity.