A lifetime fighting Putin's aggression drives the EU's next diplomatic chief

When Kaja Kallas became Estonia’s prime minister she thought foreign policy was her weak spot. So she got to work. With recommendations from other leaders, Kallas drew up a study program. And she’s still at it.

She’s currently reading a history of Iran and has plowed through works by Margaret Thatcher, Henry Kissinger and a biography of Ukraine’s Volodymr Zelenskyy this year — as well as books about the Middle East, Israel-Palestine and Taiwan. Graham Allison’s "Destined for War," on the dangers of the U.S.-China rivalry, was suggested by the NATO secretary general. Foreign policy, she told Adam Grant on his "Re:Thinking" podcast last year, “is not my weakness anymore.”

European Union leaders apparently agreed with that assessment when they nominated the 47-year-old former lawyer to become the bloc’s chief diplomat at a summit in Brussels Thursday.

Provided she clears the hurdle of parliamentary hearings and begins her new role in November, Kallas will be dealing with a war in the Middle East, economic security threats from China and the struggle to engage a skeptical Global South that is being courted by Moscow and Beijing.

But most of all she will be charged with shaping the EU response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That, along with Vladimir Putin’s threat to the rest of Europe, is a subject she knows inside out.

Like most of her generation in the Baltics, Kallas was born and educated under Soviet occupation. Her nomination is a sign of how the EU’s priorities are changing as the war shifts the center of political gravity eastward.

“Kaja Kallas is the European politician who has proven that she knows best how to read Putin,” said Martin Selmayr, formerly the top civil servant in the European Commission, who currently teaches EU law at the University of Vienna. “She is thus ideally placed to lead the EU’s foreign policy at this critical juncture.”

This account of her political journey is based on conversations with numerous people who’ve worked with her, most of whom asked not to be named when discussing private conversations.

Kallas often tells the story of how her mother was deported to Siberia in a cattle wagon with her family as a baby.

She initially steered clear of politics, wanting to chart her own path. Her father, Siim Kallas, was a central banker who became Estonia’s prime minister from 2002 to 2003 and then a European commissioner for a decade.

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