Michael Scott Doran

Michael Doran (born April 25, 1962) is an American expert on the international politics of the Middle East. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. He was previously a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has been a visiting professor at the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service at New York University. Prior to that, he was an assistant professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and taught at the University of Central Florida. He was appointed to the National Security Council and was also Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of Defense under the George W. Bush administration.

In a Foreign Affairs article, "Somebody Else's Civil War," he argued that the September 11 attacks were part of a religious conflict within the Muslim world. Doran wrote that Osama bin Laden's followers "consider themselves an island of true believers surrounded by a sea of iniquity." Hoping that U.S. retaliation would unite the faithful against the West, bin Laden sought to spark revolutions in Arab nations and elsewhere—war with America was never his end; it was just a means to promote radical Islam. This article was "the first to advance the thesis...that Osama bin Laden used the attacks of 9/11 as a tool for influencing a conflict between Muslims."

Doran received his Ph.D in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 1997. His PhD advisor was L. Carl Brown. He attended Stanford University, graduating with a BA in History in 1984.

Doran is Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, which he joined in 2014. Before that, he was a Senior Fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Politics at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was a Visiting Professor, at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School for Public Service. Before returning to academia, he was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Diplomacy at the U.S. Department of Defense in April 2007 after being the Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs at the National Security Council from 2005–2007. His teaching career began at the University of Central Florida and he later joined the Near East Studies Department at Princeton University as Assistant Professor until he was appointed to the George W. Bush administration.

He has served as Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and is a scholar with the Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) project of the National Security Studies Program at Harvard University. He is a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post.

• Pan-Arabism Before Nasser: Egyptian Power Politics and the Palestine Question. 1999. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516008-8.
• "Two Turkish Tales", The Washington Post, 9 July 2000.
• "Somebody Else's Civil War". Foreign Affairs, January/February 2002.
• "Palestine, Iraq and American Strategy", Foreign Affairs, January/February 2003.
• "The Saudi Paradox", Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004.
• "Intimate Enemies", The Washington Post, 18 February 2004.
• "What Carter Owes Begin". In Menachem Begin’s Zionist Legacy. 2015. Koren Publishers. ISBN 9781592644155.
• Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East. 2016. Free Press. ISBN 9781451697759.

He has been called "an aficionado of Muslim extremist Web sites".