Last Thursday, President Donald Trump told an audience in the White House Rose Garden that “the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord”.  This is the 2015 Paris Agreement, adopted under the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It has 195 signatory States, of which 147 – including the US – have ratified so far.

Trump’s rhetoric was defensive, isolationist, protectionist. Driven by “foreign lobbyists” and “global activists”, the Paris Accord works for “the exclusive benefit of other countries”, he said, and imposes “draconian financial and economic burdens” on the US, its businesses, its workers and its taxpayers: “lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories”.

But, he added, the US will begin negotiations to re-enter the Paris Accord or another agreement “on terms that are fair”. “If we can make a deal that’s fair, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.”

In other words: The Paris Agreement is a bad deal, made by President Obama. The author of The Art of the Deal will seek a better one. Trump’s announcement provoked dismay outside the Rose Garden and across the oceans, including from other G7 leaders. Anger, analysis and assessment are still swirling. What can be observed today, before the dust has settled? Three points…

Science. First, Trump’s statement did not openly question the reality of human-induced climate change. Trump had previously been a denier of the impressive body of supporting scientific evidence, even dismissing the phenomenon as a Chinese-inspired “hoax” aiming to handicap US industry. But not in the Rose Garden!

Was this discretion due to inner circle familiars who, though not in the front row on Thursday, advocate an open-minded attitude towards climate change? Will Trump follow President George W. Bush from doubt to laid-back acceptance?

The announcement provoked dismay outside the Rose Garden and across the oceans

Economics. Second, while his jabs against China and India were regrettable, his numbers for economic losses uncertain and his portrayal of the Green Climate Fund wildly wrong, Trump was right to address climate change in an economic framework. After all, it results from an economic model launched by the 19th century industrial revolution, fuelled successively by coal, oil and natural gas, and accompanied by deforestation. This model has been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, destabilising the global climate.

Adverse climatic impacts challenge sustainable development in all countries, while poverty constrains the responses. Millions of people in poor communities in Asia and the Pacific face the existential threat of rising sea levels eroding their living space. Others in Africa flee drought along the hazardous paths of irregular migration. These are fundamental economic and social issues, not a tree-huggers’ agenda.

What Trump’s Rose Garden vision failed to recognise, however, is that climate change will harm the US economy and the res-ponse to it – notably investment in energy efficiency and in ever-cheaper renewable energies – can be a driver of economic revival. In a country that excels in technological innovation, he should be exploring new opportunities and helping US workers move into them, rather than waxing nostalgic about coal and the rust belt.

As Obama commented after Trump’s statement: “The nations that remain in the Paris Agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created.” Indeed, several US entrepreneurs, State governors and mayors affirmed they would maintain climate action in the directions set by the Agreement.

Tactics. Third, the statement raises an interesting tactical question: How will Trump pursue his intent to withdraw and negotiate re-entry? The leaders of France, Germany and Italy reacted by affirming their belief that the Agreement cannot be “renegotiated”. But does that response cover all the issues?

Consider Trump’s options. Since only a State Party to the UNFCCC may be Party to the Agreement, one option is to withdraw from the Agreement by withdrawing from the Convention itself, giving a year’s notice.

That is the fast-track option. It could also be the nuclear option for the US. Re-entry to the Agreement via the Convention would have to be approved by a Senate that might prefer to blow up bridges to international negotiations than to build them.

Did Trump hint at this option? No. Nor did the hard-line Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency who spoke after him. Again, one may speculate about the influence of pro-climate insiders.

A softer option is for the US to withdraw from the Agreement while staying in the Convention. That, too, requires a year’s notice but the earliest date when it may be given is early November 2019. And that would give The Donald time to manoeuvre.

What could that manoeuvre be? At the core of the Paris Agreement are national plans to combat climate change that must be regularly presented, reviewed and updated. Their content is determined nationally; their achievement is not bound by the Agreement. While it is expected that each update will progress to greater national ambition, it’s not clear that other parties could do more than regret the offence to the spirit of the Agreement if the US reduced the ambition of its national plan.

Thus, without modifying the Agreement or even actually withdrawing from it, Trump might be able to cynically spin a weakened national plan to his core supporters as a “negotiated re-entry”, a victory for US sovereignty in advance of the 2020 US elections.

That would be uncharacteristically subtle. Further judgement awaits news of formal steps by the US towards disengagement.

Michael Zammit Cutajar was engaged in the United Nations negotiations on climate change from 1991 to 2015 in various international and national capacities.