In 2021, when Russia started amassing troops along its border with Ukraine, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposed that the European Union invite Russian President Vladimir Putin for a summit. Kaja Kallas—then the prime minister of Estonia, a country of 1.3 million—slammed the idea. Rather than hope that the Russian president’s behavior would change, she argued, Europe should recognize that he had been acting entirely consistently for years, since the annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The proposal was dropped, but Kallas rose in stature. History proved her right as Russia rolled in tanks in an attempt to take Kyiv in early 2022, and she was seen as the right woman at the right time to be plucked out of domestic politics and placed into the EU’s top echelon. Her reputation as a Russia hawk denied her a chance to lead the NATO military alliance, but she was handed a choice alternative: EU’s high representative for foreign affairs.
But the straight talk that brought the Estonian leader into the limelight hasn’t served her well in her new role.
“We expect her to be, well, more diplomatic,” said an EU-based diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“She is more cop than diplomat,” added another. “Her day starts and ends with Russia.”
Her tendency to say what’s on her mind has strained ties with the Trump administration and also irked other major powers, such as India and China. She recently visited Qatar to meet her Iranian counterpart but did so as a mediator rather than an active negotiator. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s top diplomat back in 2015, was widely credited for her negotiating skills in making that year’s U.S.-Iran nuclear deal happen. Mogherini’s successor, Josep Borrell, tried to revive the deal when U.S. President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018 and was a prominent voice against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Moreover, Kallas hasn’t managed to drive consensus on one of the most important files—the Israel-Hamas conflict—and even seems sidelined on Ukraine. French President Emmanuel Macron; German Chancellor Friedrich Merz; NATO boss Mark Rutte; and to some extent, even European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have become the faces of a united Europe.
Rutte, also a former prime minister, managed to grab attention over the summer as he succeeded in keeping Trump on board with NATO and convinced member states to up their defense spending. Von der Leyen has struck a trade deal with the United States, which—while criticized—has at least temporarily eased tensions between the EU and the United States. Meanwhile, Kallas was “marginalized” in that process, since she was seen as far too critical of Washington, said one of the diplomats.
And yet she must grapple with a unique set of challenges as she tries to coordinate the foreign policy of 27 member states without sufficient power to speak for them.
Under Kallas’s leadership, the EU has managed to strike a deal with Israel that calls for the provision of more aid to Gaza. The EU’s diplomatic service, the European External Action Service (EEAS) has hailed the agreement as Kallas’s victory.
“It’s diplomacy one on one,” said Anouar El Anouni, an EU spokesperson, in response to a question from Foreign Policy at a daily press conference.
Two weeks ago, Anouni gave a detailed account of aid sent by Europe to the region by the start of September.
He told Foreign Policy that “2,904 trucks have entered” and that “Jordanian and Egyptian routes” have been reopened. An increased amount of fuel has entered Gaza while “repairs to vital infrastructure have improved,” and added that “water access in the South Gaza desalination plant is also operational.” He said that Israel was expected to do more but added that shipments will continue: “In August, a ship carrying 1,200 [metric] tons of aid departed from Limassol, Cyprus.”
Kallas herself claimed success and shot back at her predecessor, Borrell, for achieving “nothing” despite all his condemnation of Israel.
“We managed to get humanitarian aid to Gaza,” Kallas said.
“Look at what we have achieved. We work with the Israeli government to reach a humanitarian understanding and on having concrete measures,” she later said in an interview with Foreign Policy editor in chief Ravi Agrawal on Sept. 23. “It’s not enough, but it’s better than zero.”
Some aid is certainly better than none. But at a time when scholars accuse Israel of committing a genocide, some Europeans would prefer for Kallas to take a more strident moral stance.
And Eran Lerman, a former Israeli deputy national security advisor, said that in his view, the Israeli authorities may have decided to rework their aid strategy in Gaza on their own.
“Kallas played a role in the way we talk, but she by herself isn’t the reason for aid coming in or anything else,” he told me over the phone. “But of course, Germany is our key ally in the region, so what Berlin says is taken in consideration,” he added.
Kallas is hardly the one to blame if European member states are reluctant to act against Israel. On Sept. 16, she pointed fingers at Germany and asked the country to present “alternatives” if it continued to oppose options she had proposed. In a review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement that was asked for by member states, Kallas’s team offered a set of 10 options for sanctions that ranged from suspension of preferential tariffs—the EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner—to suspension of visa-free travel as well as measures reducing research and scientific cooperation.
But to implement any of these would require either consensus, or at least consent from 15 countries that represent 65 percent of the EU’s population. This can only be achieved with backing from either Italy or Germany. Both are holding out.
Among the constraints that Kallas faces is her rank, which places her a step below the European Commission president and the leaders of major European economies. She is often overshadowed by other Europeans keen to make a mark on the world stage. Early in September, the von der Leyen proposed sanctioning “extremist” Israeli ministers as well as partially suspending trade covered in the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
“Kallas had laid the groundwork for many of the ideas tabled by the Commission president in her speech,” wrote one of the EU diplomats who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Macron has also bigfooted Kallas. He has taken credit for leading the so-called coalition of the willing, a grouping of roughly 30 countries that have signed up to help Ukraine and monitor the peace once a cease-fire with Russia is agreed upon.
“The European Union input to the coalition of the willing were prepared for months by Kallas with defense and foreign ministers,” the EU diplomat added.
A few days ago, Kallas herself claimed a small victory: She said the EU has delivered 80 percent of a proposed 2 million artillery shells to Ukraine, a plan that she first unveiled in March. At the time, Politico cited several EU diplomats and officials who accused Kallas of overstepping and “acting like a prime minister.” Other reports said her plan was downsized.
But the biggest challenge for Kallas seems to be maintaining ties with the United States, whether that’s because the Trump administration doesn’t see her as important enough to engage with or because of her own diplomatic missteps.
In February, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio canceled a scheduled meeting with Kallas at the last minute. Then, after the public spat in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky later that month, Kallas took to X and said in a scathing post: “The free world needs a new leader.”
An EU official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the post “didn’t help relations with the U.S.”
Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said that Kallas is the only European leader with the mandate to craft a common EU foreign policy. But the product of her autonomy is “not a path to closest ties with Washington.”
Kallas has no love lost for Beijing and New Delhi, both of which buy huge amounts of fuel from Russia, the country that she would prefer to isolate. But the feeling has often seemed to be mutual. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson publicly fumed at Kallas’s seeming dismissal of China’s military role during World War II and said that Kallas’s statement “blatantly stokes rivalry and confrontation,” undermines the EU’s own interests, and is “preposterous and irresponsible.”
Indian experts objected to her post on X calling for restraint amid that country’s skirmishes with Pakistan, and some saw her recent comments on Europe adopting a “carrots” and “sticks” approach with India as it unveiled a new strategy agenda as unnecessarily harsh.
“Kaja Kalas has been parachuted into a job she is not qualified for,” wrote Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary, in a post on X, adding, “She is contributing to Europe’s geopolitical drift by her anti- Russian paranoia.”
Kallas has tried to at least signal policy alignment with Washington by calling for an end to Iran’s nuclear program, and the message from her office is that she met with Rubio at a recent Group of Seven foreign ministers’ meeting and that ties with the United States are fine. But she isn’t one to butter up.
Months after the Rubio snub and the anti-Trump tweet fiasco, when asked about the provision of U.S. weapons for Ukraine, she said: “If you promise to give the weapons, but say that somebody else is going to pay for it, it’s not really given by you, is it?” That comment contrasted sharply with NATO chief Rutte exalting Trump as the “daddy” of Europe.
“She is direct and honest,” said the EEAS official, and “if you expect all-out flattery, you won’t get it from her.”
The EU diplomats whom Foreign Policy spoke to insisted that Kallas is a team player and only interested in getting the task done, and not in taking credit. And yet several observers agreed that she needs some sort of a win that goes beyond her candid style.
Then again, perhaps she’s driven less by a desire to succeed as a coordinator of European diplomats but rather as a European politician specifically advocating for greater strategic autonomy. In that sense, if she calls out the danger of authoritarianism not only in Russia but also on the other side of the Atlantic, that may not be an accident.