Call him the Trump administration's Enigma machine, the steady hand who decodes the still bewildering array of signals coming out of the White House. Or call him the good cop.
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US Vice-President Mike Pence is travelling the key countries of Asia to project reassurance. To Australia, in which he arrives on Friday night, he is a conduit to the Oval Office, an interlocutor in the form of a traditional Republican who values alliances, believes in free trade and holds to an orthodox foreign policy.
"Vice-President Pence is a very reassuring figure," as one senior Canberra source put it.
During Mr Pence's two-day visit to Sydney this weekend, the Australian government will be looking to him for insights into what President Donald Trump has planned on such key issues as North Korea, China, Syria and trade.
He will meet Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull - who had a famously difficult phone conversation with Mr Trump in late January - Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and other Labor frontbenchers, as well as Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove. He will also address business leaders and visit Sydney tourist sites.
From the US perspective, it is a listening tour to gauge how allies are feeling about the most unusual administration in living memory, and a chance to calm allies and partners feeling nervous and uncertain.
However much other world leaders backed Trump's Tomahawk missile attack on Syria and support his efforts to leverage from China greater action to curb North Korea, they are still trying to fit such episodes into a broader understanding of the US President's foreign policy and look for ways to respond.
Ms Bishop, who invited Mr Pence to Australia when they met in Washington in February, has been vocal about the need for more US engagement in Asia, and even observed recently that many countries were "in a strategic holding pattern" as they waited to see what Mr Trump would do.
James Brown, research director at the US Studies Centre, said Australia had a wide range of contacts in Washington but Mr Pence's visit would be an opportunity to gain insight into Mr Trump's thinking on key issues.
"Australia is pretty closely engaged with the US military and intelligence services ??? The only question is what is the President's personal thinking on North Korea? That will be something of interest in the discussion," he said.
He said Australia would also be keen to gauge the US thinking on free trade in the Asia-Pacific region after Mr Trump ditched the long-planned Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The US is not expected to launch any kind of replacement to the TPP and will pursue only new bilateral agreements, Fairfax Media understands.
Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, said Mr Pence's tour aimed to project reassurance and "settle our nerves" - a view that Professor Brown also expressed.
"The Trump administration is moving beyond its disastrous start," Dr Fullilove said. "It's feeling its way towards a more orthodox foreign policy, but no one has forgotten that for three decades Donald Trump has held to a radical world view.
"Therefore Mr Pence has been travelling abroad to show that there is someone more traditional in a crucial position."
While Mr Trump has made a virtue of his unpredictability, arguing that it keeps adversaries off-balance, Dr Fullilove said it also kept allies guessing.
"You expect superpowers to be predictable," he said.
