The world is at a hinge moment in history: The United States has reached the end of a global ascendency in political, economic, and cultural terms. This is not just about the "rise of the rest" -- the Indias and Chinas of the world. It's also about what I call "middling America," a society that is lagging behind others on standard barometers of modernity, from healthcare to education, from financial regulation to the application of green and digital technologies. The global economic crisis, with America as the epicenter, is a case in point of a tarnished U.S. model. At the same time, venerable American institutions, whether it's Harvard or Hollywood, have migrated to a post-national, global identity; they belong to the world more than to the United States. The future, in short, is no longer happening only, or even especially, in America. The gold standards of global excellence are scattered around the planet.

Yet even as America is fading, the question of what comes next is far from answered. This is a time of interregnum, with multiple narratives in play, any one of which could triumph as a product of circumstance and choice. History is an organic, bottom-up process, and the future might come from where we least expect it. The After America world could prove a dark chaos, as took root after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Or, it could be a happy chaos made possible by the personal empowerment of 21st-century technologies that would render America the last global goliath -- ever. What's next could be a multipolar order of nation-states, with rising powers such as India and Brazil taking the helm. Then again, perhaps the world really does need a top dog, an alpha power, in which case the After America world could become the Chinese Century. City-states could also fill the void -- not just New York, London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, but also places like Bangalore, Dubai, Santiago, and Johannesburg. The After America world could be a true global society, a universal civilization lending itself to global governance. Or it could be none of these things. The future is a blank canvas.

Who wins and who loses in each of these scenarios of the After America world? In a dark chaos, the answer is not, as might be thought, losers everywhere on the planet. The winners, or at least the beneficiaries, will be the vultures of the world -- in the financial area, for example, the short-sellers, the hopers for the worst, who profit only when prices plummet. In a dark chaos, there will be many corpses to pick clean. The growing numbers of people around the world who already think in brute survivalist terms -- who have stockpiled their supplies of canned food, bottled water, and antibiotics and dug their shelters -- will be winners in the sense of having prepared for times that most others ridiculed them for predicting. Gold hoarders may feel smug.

A happy chaos, by contrast, will reward those who are able to unbutton their collars and find their innermost Merry Prankster. Victory goes to those who can think and act laterally, defeat to those who can operate only in a world of hierarchies. Perhaps the patches of the planet that in the past have spawned interludes or at least ideologies of happy chaos -- like Dada Zu rich and Berlin after the First World War and Grateful Dead California of the 1960s -- will prove especially fertile ground for a 21st-century variation of this type. Perhaps a happy chaos will flourish in Eastern societies, like India, with an ingrained skepticism of a world defined by power relations. More than anything else, winning in happy chaos will require a certain philosophical preparedness.

In a multipolar world of nation-states, the biggest winners will be those states that can succeed in establishing regional hegemonies in their neighborhoods. The world's regional policemen might include the United States in North America; Brazil in South America; India and China in Asia; Russia in its "near abroad"; possibly Iran in the Middle East (with Israel fending for itself); and South Africa in sub-Saharan Africa. Europe can be a winner if it finds the will to assert itself in this order. If not, Europe can expect to find itself increasingly encroached upon by other powers, like Russia. The losers will include weak small states -- the Georgias of the world -- that bank on protection against the local neighborhood bully -- in Georgia's case, Russia -- from an America no longer up to the task. The grimmest fate will await those peoples who feel themselves as a nation but are bereft a viable state. These are the Palestinians of the world, the many millions who live in what seem to be permanently failed states -- states in name only. The multipolar world will likely be democratic in some regions and autocratic in others, according to the traditions of the neighborhoods -- and in that sense, this world will represent a defeat for champions of liberal Western values as a universal standard. The multipolar world will be peaceful to the degree that the big players can arrive at satisfactory terms for coexistence.

China wins in a Chinese Century, but who else? Asian societies with a history of tense relations with the Chinese, including the Japanese and the Vietnamese, may be losers. India fears being a loser but may not be, given the protection afforded by its sheer size and the ways in which its economy complements China's. Distance may prove a blessing for the economies that succeed in developing profitable trade relationships with China -- from the Pacific Coast of America to continental Europe. For resource-rich lands that China aims to exploit, like Chile with its copper treasure, much depends on whether China is disposed to be a benign or a cruel imperial ruler.

An age of global city-states as well as a universal civilization offers a chance for Europe to matter again, in a large way, because Europe is a font of the cosmopolitan values that would be ascendant in these worlds. But North Americans, South Americans, and Asians are by no means dealt out. There would be tremendous opportunities for global elites -- for architects, artists, business executives, university presidents, political leaders, global-health specialists, and others who tend to live in big cities and who already are starting to think of themselves as a superclass. The multilingual person stands to do better than the monolingual one. Woe to those in the provinces, on the margin of things, and unable to think or operate in a global way.

As the After America world starts to take definition, the planet naturally will become less America-focused. For some, America's descent from the heavens will be cause for what the Germans call schadenfreude, pleasure taken in another's pain. But as the world becomes accustomed to a new order of things, I suspect the enduring sentiment will be more like indifference. Our species tends to be heartless that way.

Reprinted from After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age, by Paul Starobin, with permission of Viking, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.