President Clinton has urged the United Nations to take up the triple challenge for the new millennium of reducing world poverty, preventing mass killing and averting the threat from weapons of mass destruction.
He also promised to do his best to ensure that the US paid its outstanding dues to the international organisation of over $1 billion.
The President, who was addressing the UN General Assembly in New York, defended the NATO campaign in Kosovo as in accord with UN principles even though it was undertaken without the formal approval of the UN Security Council, where China and Russia have a veto.
He insisted that NATO's actions "followed a clear consensus expressed in several Security Council resolutions, that the atrocities committed by the Serb forces were unacceptable, that the international community had a compelling interest in seeing them end. Had we chosen to do nothing in the face of this brutality, I do not believe we would have strengthened the United Nations. Instead we would have risked discrediting everything it stands for."
This could be seen as a response to the doubts raised by the secretary general, Mr Kofi Annan, to the failure to obtain UN sanction for the action in Kosovo which he raised in his speech to the assembly the previous day. Mr Annan asked whether there was not "a danger" of such interventions undermining the UN-based security system and of setting "dangerous precedents for future interventions".
Mr Clinton, who was hoarse because of allergies, had to struggle at times to continue speaking.
On the sensitive question of continuing sanctions against Iraq where there is disagreement among the five permanent members of the security council, the President insisted that "we cannot allow the government of Iraq to flout 40 - and I say 40 - successive security council resolutions and to rebuild its arsenal". But he also said that "despite all the obstacles Saddam Hussein has placed in our path we must continue to ease the suffering of the people of Iraq."
Mr Clinton acknowledged that the present status of the US as the world's military and economic superpower is "a source of concern to many". But he defended the US as trying to be "a force for peace and to promote democracy instead of imposing our values on others. . .We have sought to help former adversaries like Russia and China become prosperous, stable members of the world community because we feel far more threatened by the potential weakness of the world's leading nations than by their strength," he said.