Quote Originally Posted by FreelancePoliceman View Post
By "disintegration," I primarily mean a social collapse, though this is connected to economic/political/military decline. No matter what the country's resources are like, without a functioning society they can't be taken advantage of.
That's reasonable. Even worse than a spectacular collapse, it could just keep trundling along in zombified form forever, unable to be fixed, unable to fully die or to be put out of its misery. See cyberpunk fiction for reference.