Chinese President Jiang Zemin is nothing if not a gambler. A few days before a crucial U.S. Senate vote on granting China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR) with the U.S., Mr. Jiang raised an issue that will have many senators seeing red. He said, in effect, that Taiwan should not be admitted to the World Trade Organization on any conditions other than those set by Beijing.

Addressing a business group during his visit to New York for the United Nations summit, Mr. Jiang said that of course Taiwan could join the WTO, but only as a part of China. Now, of course this statement is subject to various interpretations, and some might say that it is only a problem of semantics. But many U.S. senators will want to know whether they are being asked to approve PNTR under conditions laid down solely by China, with little regard for U.S. interests.

We have argued here for some time that granting China PNTR as a prelude to China's admission to the WTO is a good idea. It would open up China further to western trade and investment, hastening the development in China of free enterprise and a propertied middle class. A more enlightened and influential electorate will gradually demand more explicit civil rights and require governments at all levels to become more responsive to the wishes of the people.

But we also have supported the right of the Taiwanese, who already have a functioning democracy, to chart their own course toward better relations with the mainland, without undue pressure from Beijing. This attitude toward Taiwan is shared by an influential bloc in the U.S. Congress that will not appreciate having Mr. Jiang laying down conditions for Taiwan's membership in the WTO. It is well known in Congress that Taiwan qualified, in a technical sense, for WTO membership a long time ago. It was thought that Taiwanese membership was an implicit part of the deal that grants China PNTR.

If there has been a dangerous misunderstanding here, it is largely Bill Clinton's fault. In his visit to China in 1998 he imprudently agreed to what the Chinese government called the "Three No's." At the root of these three demands was the requirement that the U.S. not grant Taiwan admission to any world body that required statehood as a condition of membership. While that didn't specifically apply to the WTO, Mr. Clinton's agreement was tantamount to allowing China to set the conditions for future western policy toward Taiwan. It came very close to an acknowledgement that Taiwan is a Chinese province.

So now Mr. Jiang feels emboldened to come to the U.S. and give speeches implying that Taiwan must accept China as its parent if it wants to get the same trading privileges that the U.S. Senate is about to grant to China. No doubt Mr. Jiang was inspired by other recent U.S. concessions. For example, because of Chinese objections, the Dalai Lama was not allowed to participate in the religious gathering that preceded the summit. China's harsh control of Tibet, like its hoped-for acquisition of Taiwan, is seen by Beijing as nobody else's business and one might easily get the impression that the Clinton administration agrees.

Given all the kow-towing that Bill Clinton has done, it was no surprise that the Chinese president treated him with some disdain when the two sat down for a chat last Friday. Mr. Clinton, in yet another concession to China, had just announced that his administration would make no further efforts to build a national missile defense. When Mr. Clinton raised the issue of missiles as a threat to Western security, Mr. Jiang responded with silence. And when Taiwan came up, he favored Mr. Clinton with a long monologue laying out China's historical claims to Taiwan. In short, Mr. Clinton got a cold shoulder on both of these important issues.

These are the fruits of a Clinton policy that has, in effect, left Taiwan blowing in the wind. In verbalizing the "Three No's" in Shanghai (no support for Taiwan's independence; for one Taiwan, one China; or for Taiwan's membership in international organizations requiring statehood) Mr. Clinton foreclosed self-determination by the people of Taiwan and undercut Taipei's status in negotiations with Beijing.

Try as he may now, Mr. Clinton is hard pressed to put a positive spin on his China legacy. The nuclear proliferation issues that have bedeviled Sino-U.S. relations since he took office in 1993 remain essentially unresolved. And by violating the security assurances of his Republican Party predecessors, he has left his successor a tinderbox situation in the Taiwan Strait.

This is why Mr. Clinton knows China's accession to the WTO is about much more than the mutual benefits of expanded global trade. He's gambling it will head off -- Communist Party or no -- the kind of militant Chinese nationalism that could spark a shooting war across the Taiwan Strait, force a U.S. military response and perhaps envelop the rest of Asia.

China's accession to the WTO is also vital to the 22 million people living on the island of Taiwan. Over the past decade, Taiwan has shifted so much of its industrial production to mainland China that denial of PNTR would have a devastating negative impact on Taiwan's economy. Once both China and Taiwan have joined WTO, increased interaction and economic integration will encourage peaceful relations across the unstable Taiwan Strait.

Thus, the peace dividend; within China, WTO will empower a bloc of interests favoring outward-oriented growth and the conditions required to secure it, including peace and the rule of law. Dependent on Taiwanese and Western commerce, China would reconsider military adventurism as too costly and counterproductive.

It all sounds good. Indeed, China's membership in the WTO is, in the words of one observer, the "Rubicon of its opening to the outside world," since all previous efforts to integrate its economy with the world trading community have been unsuccessful. But this assumes a lot. For example, that the growing integration of the international economy is a linear process. It assumes markets, governments and multilateral institutions, rather than freedom of public action, will produce solutions to the many problems that are likely to arise from economic and political globalization.

It assumes China's behavior amid change will be predictable, that it will set aside the longstanding historical grievances and nationalist claims that fuel its commitment to an extension of regional power in Asia through the acquisition of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. It assumes that, in the absence of stronger cooperative security ties with Europe and Japan and deterrents such as theater missile defense, future U.S. administrations will be able to "manage" relations with China.

Economic liberalization and rules-based free trade mean facilitating cooperation between states. In the best of the possible worlds we imagine, international economic institutions like the WTO may very well help spread among some nations the practice of a decentralized and pluralistic brand of governance. But trade agreements and their trickle-down effects alone cannot suffice for a coherent, long-term national security policy that squarely faces up to the realities of America's emerging strategic threats.

Today, U.S. senators will debate whether to punish China for its exports of nuclear weapons technology by adding an amendment to the bill granting PNTR. The measure would require the U.S. president to impose graded sanctions on Beijing if Washington suspects Chinese firms of shipping weaponry to U.S. adversaries. There is little chance the amendment will succeed.

That's no big loss, since these kinds of sanctions are a poor substitute for a coherent foreign policy. We know they do little to achieve their narrow goal of inducing change. But at least the debate will serve notice that some very sensible people in the Senate realize that the U.S. cannot hang its future security relationship with China, and Taiwan, on WTO, as President Clinton seems to have done. It remains for the next administration to rectify this mistake.

But for the moment, WTO is the matter before the Senate. It is too bad that Mr. Jiang and Mr. Clinton have gone out of their way to make it difficult for Senators to vote in favor of this otherwise positive step in U.S.-China relations.