Helle C. Dale is the Heritage Foundation's Senior Fellow in Public Diplomacy studies. Her current work focuses on the U.S. government’s institutions and programs for strategic outreach to the public of foreign countries, as well as more traditional diplomacy, critical elements in American global leadership and in the war of ideas against violent extremism.
She joined The Heritage Foundation in 2002 as Deputy Director of Heritage’s Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies, the think tank’s umbrella institute for all branches of study relating to international relations. In this capacity, among other tasks, she supervised the institute’s production of research papers.
After 2005, she also was Director of Heritage’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, which currently houses the fields of Middle Eastern, Latin American and Eurasian studies as well as defense and homeland security research.
Dale’s career started in journalism, where she worked for both domestic and foreign publications as well as print and electronic media. In 1991, she was hired by The Washington Times as Deputy Editorial Page Editor. In this position, she was responsible for the newspaper’s editorial positions in foreign affairs and national security policy. Since 1995, she has written a widely-read weekly foreign affairs column that appears on the op-ed page of The Washington Times as well as in newspapers throughout the United States.
In 1997, she was named the newspaper’s Editorial Page Editor, where she oversaw the paper’s policy on presidential, congressional and local politics as well as foreign affairs.
She has traveled widely in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East and Asia. Dale still writes about foreign policy issues and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Policy Review, The Weekly Standard, National Review and European Affairs. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, C-CPAN, PBS, BBC and Al Jazeera.
Dale earned a diploma of English studies in Oxford, England, graduated with a master’s degree in English and American studies from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and pursued graduate work in American studies at Tufts University, Boston.
She is a media fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, serves on the Board of Visitors of the Institute on Political journalism at Georgetown University, the Center for Free Inquiry at Hanover College in Indiana, and Business for Diplomatic Action. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.