Owen Harries, the founding editor of the National Interest magazine, passed away on June 25 at age 90. He will be sorely missed by his family, friends, and a broader community of scholars and policy-makers who were touched by his work as an editor, scholar, and convener.
Owen’s career and my own were deeply intwined, and it is safe to say that without him, I would not be where I am today. I met Owen originally for a lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1988, when I was a researcher focusing on Soviet foreign policy at the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California. Owen had been appointed editor-in-chief of the National Interest, a new magazine that he and Bob Tucker were charged with turning into the foreign policy counterpart to Irving Kristol’s Public Interest. He asked me whether I had any articles in mind that I could contribute. I mentioned that I had been asked by Nathan Tarcov and Alan Bloom to give a lecture at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought under the rubric of a series on “The Decline of the West?”. I said I could write up that talk for him, but with a much more optimistic frame. He agreed immediately, and that lecture turned into “The End of History?”. The article appeared in issue No. 16 in June 1989, after Poland and Hungary had started to open up, but before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November. By that point I had moved to Washington and was working for Dennis Ross and James Baker on the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff.
Both Owen and I were utterly astounded at the reception that the article triggered. The new administration of George H. W. Bush was just getting established, and the initial interest in it had to do with the tea leaves people thought they were reading as how Bush’s foreign policy would differ from Ronald Reagan’s. It was silly to see it in this fashion, since I was a very junior official and had never bothered to clear the piece with anyone in the administration. But the article touched a deeper chord as well, as the rapidly unfolding events of the coming weeks and months made it clear that we were moving into an utterly different world order from the one defined by the Cold War.
Owen’s greatness as an editor became very evident in the way that he used the National Interest to spur debate on the topic of what that new order would look like. This took place both in the pages of the magazine, but also in the annual dinners that Owen organized. These dinners included the elite of the conservative foreign policy establishment at that time—Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, Henry Kissinger, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Nathan Glazer, Charles Krauthammer, as well as younger participants like Eliot Cohen, Bill Kristol, and myself. These were among the most interesting intellectual encounters I had ever experienced. While most members of this group had been generally hawkish on Cold War issues, there was no agreement whatsoever within that group on where US foreign policy should go in its aftermath. Some, like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, had turned isolationist, seeing the end of the Cold War as an opportunity for the United States to retrench. Owen himself was closest to Kissinger, who as a classical realist believed the U.S. had to remain part of the international system, but did not want the U.S. to embark on idealistic crusades. Others, like Krauthammer, Podhoretz, and the younger Kristol, took up the cause of global democracy promotion built around American power, what Krauthammer would call the “unipolar moment.” The members of this latter group would become the core of what came to be known as the neoconservative movement.
Even though neoconservatives constituted an important part of Owen’s circle, he was never comfortable with that position. His own views were always principled and logically consistent. He did not think that the United States could withdraw from its alliance commitments or cease acting as a global stabilizer, but he also disapproved of the democracy promotion agenda, feeling that this would end up destabilizing much of the world and lead to American overreach. Owen was also highly skeptical about the ability of international institutions to keep the peace, and had been critical of the United Nations as Australia’s ambassador to UNESCO. He was very uncomfortable with efforts by the Project for the New American Century to demonize China in the late 1990s, telling me once that they were trying to invent an enemy for their own domestic political purposes.
Unfortunately, the following decade opened with the September 11 attacks, and the U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq in which the neoconservatives played a key advocacy role. Owen stepped down from editorship of the National Interest around this time and moved back to Australia, but his views continued diverge sharply from that of the war’s advocates. His views also diverged from mine—I argued, and still believe, that promotion of democracy needed to be an important value defining US foreign policy, but had broken with my neocon friends over the war and their militarization of this effort. We argued this out on so many panels together in that period that he joked that we ought to just code our positions and refer to them by number.
Owen was the perfect editor. Being a great editor is much more difficult than most people realize. It requires an ability to suppress your own ego in favor of the writers that you are nurturing and bringing forward. It requires an ability to cast the net widely, to sense the presence of new talent, and to deal with the cantankerousness of old talent that thinks it knows everything. Owen was also good at nurturing younger editors, like The American Interest’s own founding editor, Adam Garfinkle. TAI was founded in the wake of the Iraq War to carry on the tradition of the National Interest, but broadening the focus from helping Americans to understand the world, to helping the world understand an increasingly strange America. Finally, Owen was always a very good friend and interlocutor, even at a great distance. He will be greatly missed.
