Measuring American influence from week to week seems enough of a challenge, as a glance at recent global developments illustrates. The electoral upheaval in Iran, for instance, will almost certainly give the U.S. the upper hand in any upcoming nuclear negotiations. Unless, of course, it doesn’t. Likewise, China’s distancing itself from North Korea will strengthen the U.S.’s position at the U.N. Security Council. Or it might not. The difficulty in knowing for sure arises from the fact that gauging even the nearest term outcomes means making sense of many moving parts.

What about the long term? Two recent studies from some of the smartest minds on the planet present portraits of both consensus and confusion. To simply state that the U.S. is in decline, as many do today, only catches a fraction of the reality. But a close look at future scenarios envisioned by the U.S. intelligence community and by the world’s largest corporation, Shell International, makes one thing immediately clear: In coming decades, the U.S. will face an increasingly treacherous global order, engulfed by a concomitant energy and climate crisis.

What’s most apparent about looking far into the future of U.S. influence is that, though many signs point to the very real possibility of decline, America also has all the potential to remain a guiding force. But doing so will demand a fundamental re-engineering of how the U.S. engages with the rest of the world.

About six months ago, the National Intelligence Council made public its Global Trends 2025 report. The NIC is the forward-looking think tank of the country’s intelligence community. The aim of the report is to think strategically, to set an agenda of issues at hand today that will likely shape the world 15 years from now. While the analysis is fascinatingly nuanced, perhaps the chief takeaway is that stability will devolve in many, if not most, quarters.

As the report states explicitly, the power balances of the state-based world order of 1945 will be “almost unrecognizable.” Emerging powers and the “state capitalism” of Russian, India and China will figure more prominently. Distressingly, Asia, Africa and Latin America will “account for virtually all population growth” on the planet—with radical implications that very few people are considering.

The paper from energy company Shell International (also known as Royal Dutch Shell, the world’s largest corporation) declares that the 21st century will be the age of energy. One might criticize the paper’s judgment for being colored by vested interests, but the proclamation is spot on. As the authors state in no uncertain terms, “Never before has humanity faced such a challenging outlook for energy and the planet,” before offering a haunting acronym—TANIA, for “there are no ideal answers.” Instead, to sum up their proposed scenarios, the country can either start planning now, or join the rest of the planet in scrambling later.

What both assessments make clear is not so much that U.S. influence will change – though in all likelihood it will, dramatically even – but that the context in which the country conducts its foreign affairs will demand a new kind of engagement.

Implicit in this new context is a private element. The fact that Shell even issued such a report illustrates the stark realities about energy and the environment faced by multinational corporations today. Big business has not been on the progressive side of the climate change debate. But if the situation is reaching a critical juncture where there is no sustainable option other than alternative and renewable energy, market forces could well force businesses to transform, with implications for governments.

The public sector is more of a challenge. Take the Department of Defense, which has adapted, albeit slowly, to a new era of conflict in the last two decades. But in many ways, the Defense Department remains geared not for an age of instability and state capitalism, but for a Cold War way of doing business. As for the State Department, funding has been progressively cut for decades, reflecting how purse-string politics in Congress, rather than long-term planning in accordance with the country’s interests abroad, has determined institutional strategy.

What, then, would it take to refashion the institutions of American foreign policy for the long term? To begin with, it takes vision of the kind demonstrated by the NIC and Shell reports. But it also takes the political will to break through institutional inertia, something that is far more difficult to generate. Fortunately, as we saw after World War II and, to a lesser degree, during the current global recession, a crisis often generates the necessary urgency to bypass bureaucracy and make real reform possible.

At the risk of sounding overly optimistic, the initial steps of just such a revolutionary refashioning may not be far off, if they aren’t already under way. Last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, the State Department’s counterpart to the Quadrennial Defense Review that Michele Flournoy will be leading at Defense in the coming months.

Neither alone will re-tool the institutions of American foreign policy for the scenarios described above. Hopefully, though, they will be able to see far beyond the powerful, short-term considerations that are shaping policy for the months to come on Iran and North Korea, and begin to put the country on a solid footing for the new age that is unfolding around us.

Perhaps most important to remember is that the changes in world politics during the upcoming century of energy don’t necessarily mean the decline of U.S. influence. But they do mean that the country needs to cast off the old world, and prepare for the new.