Mines has spent his career—in the U.S. Army Special Forces, the United Nations, and now the State Department—navigating civil wars in other countries, including Afghanistan, Colombia, El Salvador, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. He returned to Washington after sixteen years to find conditions that he had seen nurture conflict abroad now visible at home. Mines concluded that the United States faces a sixty-per-cent chance of civil war over the next ten to fifteen years. Is America Headed for a New Kind of Civil War?