While actively running the EU’s foreign policy on the world’s most demanding issues, Kaja Kallas still finds time outside work to read about … more foreign policy.
The top EU diplomat and former Estonian prime minister frequently talks about her love of reading, citing her favorite authors in speeches and meeting with them privately to discuss their work. Since taking up her most recent post in December 2024, she has read at least 52 books she has shared publicly — all of which she has posted on her Instagram — most of them related to international affairs. In total, she has shared more than 200 titles since 2017.
“You know, my reading list is quite long,” said Kallas, who officially serves as the high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy, at a press conference in January. “By the end, when I finish this job, I will be very smart,” she joked.
The collection closely tracks the subjects Kallas is most involved with in her role, evolving alongside her professional remit: 24 books on Russia and Ukraine, nine on China, and seven on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Further-flung regions pop up only rarely, with just three books on the rest of East Asia and none on South American politics beyond Venezuela.
“Reading books is a valuable advantage, especially as it is not so common nowadays,” an official from Kallas’ team told POLITICO. “The Middle East wars, Russia’s aggression and China’s growing influence are major geopolitical issues, so naturally they feature on the High Representative’s reading list.” Noting that she meets with ministers, officials, staff and experts daily and receives countless briefing papers, memos and other sources of information, “books are a nice addition on long-distance flights,” the official added.
The reading lists alone have not shaped the full contours of Kallas’ foreign policy, of course. But they provide a view into which political subjects Europe’s chief diplomat is interested in learning more about and where she goes looking for answers.
So, what does Kallas’ bookshelf reveal about the person shaping Europe’s diplomacy? To find out, POLITICO reviewed the 248 titles she has included on public reading lists since 2017 and spoke to 24 of the authors.
Noted bookworm
Kallas is not the only avid reader in Brussels, but few politicians talk about their love of literature quite as often. Since 2023, she has released reading lists twice a year on Instagram, and before that, she blogged about her latest reads monthly.
“I read a lot, but you’re always influenced by the books you’ve read most recently,” Kallas told POLITICO in 2025.
Political scientist Ivan Krastev, who co-authored 2019’s “The Light That Failed: A Reckoning” on why liberalism failed to spread in Eastern Europe, said Kallas had reached out to him after reading his book. She was trying to find a publisher to translate it into her native Estonian, he told POLITICO. The translation was eventually released in 2022.
While Kallas was prime minister, her government had similarly pushed for the translation of political scientist Mark Leonard’s “The Age of Unpeace: How Connectivity Causes Conflict,” which she said she would “often cite.”
“It’s interesting, particularly when a politician in a high position reads a book,” said Krastev. “They’re trying to make sense of their own experience” and “trying to answer some of the questions that [they] are struggling with.”
Indeed, Kallas’ book choices appear to closely reflect her scheduled diplomatic trips. Visiting Montenegro for the EU-Western Balkans Summit in June this year, the top diplomat had read the memoirs of Richard Holbrooke, architect of the 1995 Dayton Accords in Bosnia, and Martti Ahtisaari, the former Finnish president and mediator of the 1999 Kumanovo Agreement forcing Serbia’s withdrawal from Kosovo.
“A lot to learn also today, and actually a lot of parallels,” said Kallas of Holbrooke’s book in July.
Ahead of her trip to Sarajevo a month later, she then contacted former Swedish Prime Minister and High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina Carl Bildt about his 1998 book “Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia,” a memoir about his work in the region.
“She sent me a text and said, ‘I’m reading your book, and I like it very much.’ And I said, ‘How on earth did you get hold of that one?’” Bildt told POLITICO, joking that the book was published nearly three decades ago. “She wanted to go down into the weeds of the history … and that could be useful.”
Earlier in the year, after the U.S. forcibly captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Kallas picked up two books about the South American country, too: “Comandante: Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela” and “Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela.”
“She is one of the best-read people I know,” said Marietje Schaake, a friend and former liberal MEP who served with Kallas in the European Parliament. “That depth has shaped her thinking and her career.”
What’s in the library?
Six of the authors who spoke to POLITICO for this article specifically cited Kallas’ hawkish stance on Moscow as echoing the messages in their books — perhaps unsurprising given Kallas warned of Russia’s threat to Europe back in 2021, during her first term as prime minister.
“What is happening in Ukraine right now is what I was reading about in our own history books,” she told Vogue Greece in 2023.
Sylvie Kauffmann, author of 2023’s “Blindsided” (Les aveuglés) — which argues that Germany and France failed to recognize the Russian threat — told POLITICO her book “confirms everything that Kallas thinks” about how others downplayed Moscow’s aggression.
Speaking to POLITICO about his 2018 book “Identity,” famed political philosopher of liberal democracy Francis Fukuyama said the work contained “a kind of ideological roadmap to be able to better explain what it is that … we’re fighting for.” Noting that Ukraine’s fight against Russia was one of the reasons he wrote it, Fukuyama then praised the chief diplomat’s support for the country.
Kallas has also read extensively on Israel-Palestine, a conflict on which her stance has attracted both attention and controversy in Brussels.
Far more critical of Israel than her peers in the European Commission, Kallas reportedly compared the situation on the ground to South Africa under apartheid during a closed-door meeting in June, causing Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar to sever contact.
Two of the authors on the subject who feature on Kallas’ reading lists told POLITICO her reported comparison mirrored the arguments made in their books, with 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner Nathan Thrall saying his “aim in writing [“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy”] was to influence people like her.”
“The fact that she has come to the conclusion that Israel is practicing apartheid is most welcome as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
“I explain the aspects of apartheid, and I hope she’d see that her judgment is well founded,” echoed Michael Scott-Baumann, author of “Palestinians and Israelis: A Short History of Conflict.”
But not every author on Kallas’ lists approves of her foreign policy decisions when it comes to their topics of specialization.
Kim Ghattas, who wrote her book “Black Wave” on the Middle East, for example, said Kallas has been too passive on the Israeli-U.S. war with Iran. “That is not good policymaking. I would hope that reading books like mine can help prepare policymakers like her, specifically for moments like the one that we find ourselves in right now.”
Former U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton, who has long advocated for regime change in Iran, said he, too, wished Kallas had become more involved — though in support of President Donald Trump’s military operation.
He also noted that Kallas’ blunt style risked further alienating the U.S. from the EU, with her comments advocating for the bloc’s sovereignty “giving [Trump] the excuse to do what he probably wants to do anyway.”
Criticism extended beyond the Middle East as well. Robert D. Kaplan, author of 1993’s “Balkan Ghosts” — which heavily influenced former U.S. President Bill Clinton’s initial reluctance to militarily intervene in the region, according to his biographers — told POLITICO that Kallas’ impolitic moments “may be things that she’ll come to partially regret over time.”
“When you get far quick, you tend to make mistakes. Because you’re confident, you’re even arrogant,” said Kaplan.
Booking ahead
It’s not all about world affairs and global diplomacy, though — some of Kallas’ more recent political predicaments lie a little closer to home.
Recent months have seen the top diplomat losing a turf war with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over the bloc’s foreign policy, while her diplomatic service, the European External Action Service, has struggled to build consensus across a divided Europe.
So with the rentrée almost upon us in Brussels, there may be no better time for Kallas to get through a few more books — a strategy she has turned to previously.
While serving as prime minister, during a 2023 podcast, Kallas recalled how she once considered foreign policy to be her greatest political weakness — until she turned to books.
“It’s not my weakness anymore because I’ve read so much about this,” she said.
Perhaps this time it will be Brussels that sends her back to the stacks.