Paris, Nov 20 : While many American citizens, even some prominent local politicians no longer see Washington as legitimate, the dangers of an America that is weakened by "separatism" and affected by "factionalism" and "secession" should be put on alert, said a French researcher. Underlining "breakdown of federal authority," Romuald Sciora, associated researcher at the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, said the national cohesion would be weakened when governors rise against Washington's decisions, as it "has been since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic." Sciora made the remarks in an article last week analysing an opinion piece of Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "The US is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves," Kagan wrote in his article, titled "Our constitutional crisis is already here" and published in The Washington Post in September. "Only a blissful optimist who can see no farther than the tip of his nose could argue otherwise after what happened in Washington last January and knowing that 78 per cent of Republican voters still believe Joe Biden didn't win legitimately in 2020," Sciora said. Protesters stormed the US Capitol on January 6 after former President Donald Trump called the 2020 presidential elections "fraudulent." "We recently had a foretaste of what can await us with the assault on Congress, but also with the riots that followed the demonstrations linked to the Black Lives Matter movement and which forced big American cities to barricade themselves like in wartime," Sciora said. Many American citizens and prominent local politicians no longer see the Washington government as legitimate and refuse to recognise it as the nation's highest authority, which is very disturbing, Sciora said, adding that the Biden administration is not helping reverse this public opinion. He said that he has been repeatedly alerting his readers to the dangers of "an America that is more and more weakened by political, ethnic, cultural and religious separatism, an America where the wills of factionalism, even secession, on certain territories and states are taken more and more seriously." /IANS