Can a country commit suicide?

“From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”
                                         Abraham Lincoln

The United States was a group of individual states acting on behalf of, and in the best interests of the whole to restore the Union to what the founding fathers had cobbled together 90 years before. It succeeded at great cost of human lives and continued to build upon its successes in the face of tremendous difficulties not the least of which were depressions, and at least 4 or 5 wars. It repelled Nazi tyranny from Europe and put a man on the moon in less than 10 years. It fed the world and created a cure for polio. And then it lost its way when it mistakenly decided it could end poverty by giving away the store without receiving equal value in return, which led it to think it could  do many other outrageous things like implementing fairness and equity by legislative fiat. That led to many other mistaken ideas like controlling the climate through the use of the executive pen, or acknowledgment by governmental bodies that people are not intelligent enough to know what gender they were assigned at birth to the extent that men can call themselves women and avail themselves of the lady's room free from protest of . . . ladies; and that ladies may do the same in opposite.  The United States was once unsinkable. It could never be attacked from foreign powers because it was protected by two oceans and it was too vast to be attacked from the air.  At least that’s what I was told growing up. But that myth was dispelled on 9/11/2001. The United States is now like a box of pick up sticks (remember those?) scattered all over the table. Everyone is saying that this agency or that institution is broken. Nobody has solutions. The only answers are obfuscations or self-serving chest thumping. The unthinkable has happened to American. America has been the author and finisher of its own destruction.