Matt Bai: “If you’ve been at the beach and missed the latest world news, let me briefly catch you up. Terrorists in Syria and Iraq have been overrunning the countryside, pausing to savagely murder an American journalist. Pakistan is reeling from political crisis. The Russians just made an incursion into Ukraine, the Israelis have been blowing up every other building in Gaza, and Ebola’s rampaging through West Africa.”

“All of which has led to some of the most blistering criticism of Barack Obama’s presidency — and not just because he found time to golf. Republican leaders have called Obama feckless and incompetent, a man without a grand plan.”

“The Islamic State runs a self-sustaining economy across territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, pirating oil while exacting tribute from a population of at least eight million, Arab and Western officials said, making it one of the world’s richest terror groups and an unprecedented threat,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“That illicit economy presents a new picture of Islamic State’s financial underpinnings. The group was once thought to depend on funding from Arab Gulf donors and donations from the broader Muslim world. Now, Islamic State–the former branch of al Qaeda that has swallowed parts of Iraq and Syria–is a largely self-financed organization.”

First Read: “Strikingly, it was exactly a year ago when Washington was debating about what to do in Syria — back then, it was over the Assad regime’s chemical weapons. A year later, Syria is once again in the news — this time over whether to strike ISIS in the region. Of course, the circumstances are different. Assad’s chemical weapons weren’t viewed as the same threat to the United States that ISIS is (if unchecked). And a year ago, when it wasn’t election season, members of Congress were eager to debate whether to authorize limited airstrikes in Syria.”

“Today, in the midst of campaign season, many politicians (though there are some exceptions like Sens. Tim Kaine and Bob Corker) are notably silent on the subject… Despite those differences, the larger storyline is the same between Aug. 2013 and Aug. 2014: Syria remains the Obama administration’s most difficult foreign-policy problem. (How do you curb the Shiite Assad regime? How also do you stop the Sunni ISIS militants there?) And Syria presents the danger that if you start getting involved, it becomes hard to stop. ”