Although the nation has taken steps in the last decade to reduce the impact of such supply disruptions - the most important step may be the building of a large strategic stockpile with more than 510 million barrels - the brutal geopolitical facts of world oil remain stacked against the United States and its similarly situated allies.

The political instability exhibiited in much of the history of the Southern Levant stems from this geopolitical fact.

It is amazing to realize that after all these years of enmity between the United States and the Soviet Union, the single most significant geopolitical fact about these two nations has been all but ignored both in politics and in literature: the two countries face each other across a narrow strip of water.

The vast information overload the world struggles with, scientific theory, technological data, geopolitical facts, historical material and on and on is whipped into visual cosmologies by eight painters of widely different approach and sensibility.

Soft-liners, in deference to Finnish national pride, use kinder words in their definition of Finlandize: "to cause a neighbor to adopt a policy of neutrality," but the geopolitical fact underlying the term's use in most cases has been superpower domination.