This year's Euro Cup features eastern Europe locations--while Ukraine struggles with its public political image, Poland emerges as a player within the EU. Five years ago, I visited the stadium in Warsaw--it was a derelict, overgrown open-pit with rotting bleachers. Dodgy characters offered to sell me bootleg vodka and pirated CDs. Friends told me that handguns and AK-47s were sometimes on offer.

You'll see the same stadium (considerably revamped) soon as a centerpiece for Euro Cup matches. Decades ago, Poland distanced itself from what former US president Ronald Reagan called the "evil empire" (the Soviet Union), then the entire "Iron Curtain" came crashing down suddenly as Western newscasters struggled to pronounce the words "glastnost" and "perestroika"...and the USA lost its favorite arch-enemy.

But now the Euro Cup graces the former turf of the "evil empire," and there's another presidential election Stateside. Former US chief executives could often conjure villains for the electorate--the now-kaput Soviet Union won't do. What now? What appeals to "Generation Facebook"?

What else? "Cyberwarfare." Given the rapid rise of personal-computing power, with resultant gaps in public-understanding of technology, the specter of villains lurking online--ready to crash essential systems in a concerted cyberstrike--holds more appeal than comparing Putin to Stalin.

But a new report has wrenched the cyberwarfare-angle. , the Stuxnet worm (one of the more sophisticated viruses ever found in the wild) is the result of "a joint US and Israeli effort to target Iran's nuclear program." that the NYT report "is sure to trigger a sharp increase in state sponsored cyberattacks against American businesses and critical infrastructure targets, security experts warn."