Paul Dundes Wolfowitz (born December 22, 1943) is an American political scientist and diplomat who served as the 10th President of the World Bank, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, and dean of Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Having proposed a plan to invade Iraq in 2001, Wolfowitz was an early advocate of the Iraq War and has widely been described as an "architect" of the war. In the aftermath of the insurgency and civil war that followed the invasion, Wolfowitz denied influencing policy on Iraq and disclaimed responsibility. He is a leading neoconservative.

In 2005, he left the Pentagon to serve as president of the World Bank only to resign after two years over a scandal involving allegations he used his position to help World Bank staffer Shaha Riza to whom he was romantically linked. A Reuters report described his tenure there as "a protracted battle over his stewardship, prompted by his involvement in a high-paying promotion for his companion". Wolfowitz is the only World Bank president to have resigned over a scandal.

The second child of Jacob Wolfowitz (b. Warsaw; 1910–1981) and Lillian Dundes, Paul Wolfowitz was born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York, into a Polish Jewish immigrant family, and grew up mainly in Ithaca, New York, where his father was a professor of statistical theory at Cornell University. While Jacob Wolfowitz fled Poland after World War I, the rest of his family perished in the Holocaust.

In the mid-1960s, while Paul was an undergraduate student at Cornell residing at the Cornell Branch of the Telluride Association, he met Clare Selgin, who later became an anthropologist. They married in 1968, had three children and lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They separated in 1999, and, according to some sources, became legally separated in 2001 and divorced in 2002.

In late 1999, Wolfowitz began dating Shaha Riza. Their relationship led to controversy later, during his presidency of the World Bank Group.

Wolfowitz speaks five languages in addition to English: Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, and Indonesian. He was reportedly the model for a minor character named Philip Gorman in Saul Bellow's 2000 book Ravelstein.

Wolfowitz entered Cornell University in 1961. He lived in the Telluride House in 1962 and 1963, while philosophy professor Allan Bloom served as a faculty mentor living in the house. In August 1963, he and his mother participated in the civil-rights march on Washington organized by A. Philip Randolph Wolfowitz was a member of the Quill and Dagger society. Wolfowitz graduated in 1965 with a B.A. in mathematics. Against his father's wishes, Wolfowitz decided to go to graduate school to study political science. Wolfowitz would later say that "one of the things that ultimately led me to leave mathematics and go into political science was thinking I could prevent nuclear war."