Patrick Clawson

Clawson drew criticism for a presentation on September 21, 2012 in which he suggested the United States could consider the use of "crisis initiation" as a method of provoking Iran into war. This was part of a presentation given with Dennis Ross and David Makovsky at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy entitled How to Build U.S.-Israeli Coordination on Preventing an Iranian Nuclear Breakout.

Clawson has published many articles on the Middle East in Foreign Affairs, International Economy, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics and Middle East Journal. He has additionally published opinion pieces inThe New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. Clawson was co-convenor of the Presidential Study Group organized by The Washington Institute. The group published its recommendations to the new Bush administration in the form of a monograph, Navigating Through Turbulence: America and the Middle East in a New Century, published by The Washington Institute in 2001.

Clawson first appeared on C-SPAN in a 1990 Forum as a Research Scholar for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and has since appeared upwards of two dozen times.

Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Clawson graduated with a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1973 and earned a Ph.D. from The New School for Social Research in 1978. He taught at Seton Hall University from 1979–1981 and served as a senior economist for the International Monetary Fund from 1981 until 1985, when he took a position as a senior economist with the World Bank.

Patrick Lyell Clawson (born March 30, 1951) is an American economist and Middle East scholar. He is currently the Director for Research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and senior editor of Middle East Quarterly.