chrystia freeland will probably be confirmed as a cabinet minister in canada tomorrow; the smart money is on international trade, but there are a number of ministries that are related to foreign policy and trade initiatives, and she's a candidate for any of them - and may be shuffled around between a few of them over time. being a parliamentary democracy rather than a republic, we don't have the kind of confirmation hearings that you have in the united states. it's more like "what if the house of representatives ran the entire government". if you think on that baseline, it would be like combining the secretary of state with the house committee on foreign affairs. but, the representatives are not fixed in their roles and can be moved to any other committee/cabinet at any given time. if the liberal government sticks around a while, she'll likely get through most of the important posts, and may even one day be a contender for the prime minister's office.

if you ask around in canada, she has kind of the hillary problem - the right thinks she's a militant feminist, whereas the left thinks she's somewhat of a conservative hawk. when that happens, it's almost always the case that they're both right and they're both wrong.

what she's saying here is absolutely correct. i was posting things along these lines last year, or maybe a little earlier, suggesting that this is actually the optimal russian strategy. the reason is that the baltics are exactly where they're parking that missile defense shield, and the russians have a very dominant strategic objective in preventing this. you don't have to be a russophobe or a conspiracy theorist, or even a militant jingoist, to realize that russia has very legitimate defense concerns on their borders with nato. that's just cold objective facts. you'll get the same analysis on this from william kristol that you'll get from noam chomsky - it's not partisan, or based on a worldview, it's just the flat out reality of it.

where chrystia and i would seem to disagree is on why this is happening. see, here's the conservative hawk thing: she takes the kind of dominant washington consensus view that putin's an out of control maniac. the more subtle view, which i think is more rooted in fact, is that he's reacting to a very aggressive american foreign policy and would really rather focus on trade. when they took out ghadaffi, he didn't do anything. when they tried to take out assad, he didn't (initially) do all that much. when they went after iran, he played along. but, when they launched a coup in ukraine, he was forced to react.

to my knowledge, this isn't happening. yet. but, we have seen the russians put air defenses in iran (which is what the nuclear deal was really about) and we've seen them walk right into syria. putin's tactic seems to be to draw the center of conflict away from russia and into a proxy situation; the calculation around something like causing a ruckus in estonia is likely that it's too close to home (it's a short flight from talinn to moscow), and they'd rather fight this thing out somewhere else, if they must.

yet, given the reality, it remains entirely feasible that they could start backing oppositions not just in estonia and latvia but in poland and romania and even france. and, how she's describing this is exactly how it would happen. she knows this because it's exactly what nato did in ukraine.