But it will require more careful management, a long hard look at our own national security priorities and a willingness to work harder at the interlocking networks of alliances in the region that will no longer have a predictable US leadership at their core.

"I think the first thing to accept is that this is a genuine strategic shock, it will be disruptive" says Rory Medcalf, director of the National Security College at the Australian National University, and a former diplomat and intelligence analyst.

"There is no way now an Australian government can honestly say that our strategic environment is stable. But there is nothing to gain from a panicked response."

He believes the alliance with the US is "strong enough to weather four bad years", given the "significant contribution" Australia makes to America's understanding of what is happing in the Indo-Pacific.

But he adds that Canberra will have a responsibility to be a "voice of sense and moderation in Trump's Asia policy".

That means hosing down some of the Trump rhetoric about Japan and South Korea needing to look to nuclear weapons, for instance.

And it means knitting together more tightly other alliances and relationships around the region, especially with Japan, India and Indonesia.

"That's going to be hard but we do have the elements for this middle power coalition in place" Professor Medcalf says. "The game is going to be much more complex and multipolar than in the past."

He also thinks Australia is going to have to be "ruthless and pragmatic ... in selecting what we do ... And I think the time has come that we will have to invest more in our own security. That will demonstrate that we can pull our weight as an ally but it also hedges against the possibility of a diminished US alliance."

James Brown, research director at the US Studies Centre at Sydney University, says both Australia and the US will be going back to "first principles on how the alliance works".

He believes the US presence in the region will be "less persistent and less predictable" but that Trump is not isolationist, despite many characterising him as such.

"Where he does intervene, he will want to intervene quite forcefully and potentially quite bluntly, and Australia will need to be prepared to deal with the ramifications of that and determine how and when we support the US."

This poses a new ANZUS dilemma, Brown says, because "the language that is going to appeal to Trump and his supporters is the language of standing shoulder to shoulder in the trenches but that same language may not appeal to the Australian people. So how we balance those two messages is going to be challenging."

Brown says calls to curtail the US alliance [such as Senator Nick Xenophon flagging a "rethink"] are "very premature ... but there is a strong likelihood that we need to seriously think through spending more on defence regardless".

Alan Dupont, a former senior defence official and now adjunct professor of international security at the University of New South Wales, is convinced there there may be some upsides as well as risk in the new administration.

"He might do something silly and set off a conflict but, on the other hand, if you are looking for a bit of pushback in Asia against China or against Russia, then maybe Trump is going to put the US back in the game in a way they haven't for the last eight years."

"I don't see this as a disaster. Reality will be the great constraint on Donald Trump."

Former defence department head Paul Barratt is more alarmed saying "there is nothing about Trump that suggests he is good at taking advice".

But rather than ripping up the alliance, he says, Australia should do a "really deep stocktake of what is in our vital national interests and what we are prepared to sign up to".

That puts a huge new onus on next year's White Paper on foreign affairs.