In the latest trailer they say that the premise to the setting is that there was some kind of nuclear exchange that led to the US fracturing and collapsing.
I don't know nothing about that. the world has gone to shit. The US did break up into chunks but it put itself back together with California being part of it, but as an autonomous corporate haven inside the US from the stuff I've seen.
People didn't want to be under the US government I think and instead wanted the corporations to run things. So it started out as an experiment but and caught on like wildfire.