Clinton's partial peace-making process, launched with the Dayton Peace Accords in 1995, has turned into a full blown peace making offensive. As peace-making efforts sprout all over the world, comparisons with Octavian Augustus come to mind, not the least because his success at creating a Pax Romana salvaged his reign -- and his stature in history. PNS editor Franz Schurmann, a professor emeritus of history and sociology at U.C.-Berkeley, is author of numerous books on world affairs.

Two thousand years ago, Octavian Augustus (63 BC-14 AD) secured peace for the Roman world for a full two centuries. Our image of him may be colored by what the great Oxford historian Henry Francis Pelham called "the faults and crimes of his early manhood, his cruelties and deceptions, his readiness to sacrifice everything that came between him and the end he had in view." Yet thanks to his peace making role, Pelham wrote, "Augustus has a claim to rank as one of the world's great men."

Today, on the threshold of the third millennium, Bill Clinton has a similar opportunity. Haunted at home by the specter of possible impeachment hearings, and the butt of late night talk show ridicule, Clinton has embarked on one road that could both save his presidency and his stature in history -- a global peace making offensive.

Fueling his drive is the incontrovertible fact that he alone of all the world's rulers wields power on a grand scale. And the world's rulers know it. In his travels abroad Clinton is no longer seen as the amiable saxophone-playing young president he was in 1993. He now is acknowledged as the new American emperor.

A decade ago, this fact might have guaranteed a world-wide backlash aimed at cutting the U.S. down to size. Not any more. What most of the world's regimes also know is that they owe their own longevity to the global economy and its capacity to spread wealth around in their societies. Arguably the gravest threat they face is wars that could disrupt the global economy. And only the U.S. presidency has the power to make peace and prevent wars -- in effect to keep the global economy going.

Clinton himself did not fully appreciate this until recently when, egged on by his new friend Tony Blair, he was about to order a massive attack against Iraq. Arguments swirled back and forth within the White House's National Security Council. When Blair's foreign secretary Robin Cook revolted against his own prime minister, Clinton finally backed down.

Today, what was a partial peace-making process -- launched by the November 1995 Dayton Peace Accords and followed by the highly successful November 1997 U.S. visit by China's President Jiang Zemin -- has become a full-blown peace making offensive. Clinton's mandate is now explicit -- to use his imperial power to manage the three great "p's" of world affairs: power, prosperity and peace.

Peace-making efforts -- some with roots going back for years -- are sprouting all over the world.

• The two Koreas are finally engaged in difficult but hopeful peace talks brokered by America and China.

• Now that Washington has signaled that Beijing is a key American ally, Taipei is finally jettisoning talk of "Taiwan independence," the great bugaboo that has haunted Taiwan-China relations.

• Following a visit to Afghanistan by UN Ambassador Bill Richardson, the ruling Taliban are engaged in the first hopeful peace talks with their opposition.

• Not as hyped-up as Nixon's breakthrough to "Red China" in 1971, Clinton's rapprochement with the Islamic Republic of Iran ranks as one of the great peace-making successes of the decade. Cooperation between Washington and Teheran is the chief factor behind the hope for peace in Afghanistan.

• The little noted presence of an American delegation in Khartoum indicates a similar peace-making may be beginning with the Sudan, a close Islamic ally of Iran.

• Clinton has dispatched another peace-making team to the Serbian region of Kosovo to prevent a new Bosnia-type horror, this time between the Orthodox Serbs and the largely Muslim Albanians.

• In Africa Clinton visited Rwanda to put America's power behind the region's peace-making process and prevent the remnant Hutu Interahamwe militia from resuming the genocide.

• In Chile, he endorsed a democratic government trying to make peace between a left and right still ready to go to war with each other.

The real test for Clinton's offensive is whether he can jump start the frozen Israeli-Palestinian peace process and bring it to some final workable solution. A strong sign that Clinton is now ready to apply pressure to Israel is U.S. emissary David Newton's admission that, over the years, the U.S. has "committed errors" in its dealing with the Arab states.

Those who are seeking to bring Clinton down over his alleged misdeeds in office are now gaining new allies -- the losers in his new peace-making offensive. Octavian Augustus was able to deflect comparable attacks through the success of his Pax Romana. If Clinton's Pax Americana succeeds, his record in history could be similar to that of Augustus.