Fresh Air: New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins says President Trump's current national security adviser is a hawk who sees America as "a colossus operating anywhere it wants."

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. President Trump's national security adviser John Bolton is known as a tough-talking hawk. A new article about him in The New Yorker is titled "John Bolton On The Warpath." My guest is the author, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dexter Filkins, who's a staff writer for the magazine. He's joined us many times on the show, dating back to when he covered the war in Iraq.

Bolton is President Trump's third national security adviser, after Generals Michael Flynn and H.R. McMaster. Trump was familiar with Bolton's views because Bolton had made hundreds of appearances on Fox News as a guest, and then as a paid commentator. On Fox, he'd advocated for military strikes on Iranian training camps and for forced regime change in North Korea. Earlier in Bolton's career, he served in the George W. Bush administration as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs and as U.N. ambassador. He advocated for the invasion of Iraq and told Filkins he still thinks the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein was correct.

Dexter Filkins, welcome back to FRESH AIR. So as you point out in the piece, the Trump administration has no permanent secretary of defense, no secretary of homeland security, no ambassador to the U.N. What does it mean in terms of the power John Bolton has now in his role as national security adviser?

DEXTER FILKINS: Well, the national security adviser, just by virtue of the geography of that job - it's in the West Wing. It's right down the hall from the Oval Office. It's an incredibly powerful position. You know, Bolton sees the president every morning. He sees him or he talks to him in the evening. It's just, the proximity of that job to the presidency gives the occupant of that job just an enormous amount of power. So just on its face, you know, you're in the pole position there. But I think in this administration because, you know, it's a revolving door in the rest of the government pretty much all the time - Jim Mattis, the secretary of defense, he's gone. There hasn't been - no replacement has been named so there's an acting secretary of defense. There's no ambassador to the United Nations. There's no secretary for homeland security >>>