New Delhi, Jan 3 (IANS): The US could be under a right-wing dictator by 2030, a Canadian political science professor has warned, urging his country to protect itself against the "collapse of American democracy", The Guardian reported.

"We mustn't dismiss these possibilities just because they seem ludicrous or too horrible to imagine," Thomas Homer-Dixon, founding director of the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University in British Columbia, wrote in the Globe and Mail.

"In 2014, the suggestion that Donald Trump would become president would also have struck nearly everyone as absurd. But today we live in a world where the absurd regularly becomes real and the horrible commonplace."

Homer-Dixon's message was blunt: "By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence. By 2030, if not sooner, the country could be governed by a rightwing dictatorship," the Guardian reported.

The author cited eventualities centred on former President Donald Trump returning to the White House in 2024, possibly including Republican-held state legislatures refusing to accept a Democratic win.

Trump, he warned, "will have only two objectives, vindication and vengeance" of the lie that his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud, the report said.

A "scholar of violent conflict" for more than four decades, Homer-Dixon said Canada must take heed of the "unfolding crisis".

"A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we've turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of Covid-19, reconciliation and the accelerating effects of climate change.