The cost is horrific. My wife is British, and she's working on Brexit. I would argue that there's a direct line from the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria and the refugee crisis that flowed from that to the pressure on the European Union that has produced some extremist politics in the continent and has helped lead to Brexit. That is the cost. I don't know what the cost of that is, but that is an extraordinary line to trace: two or three million Syrian and Iraqi refugees actually cracking up our core alliance in the west, the European Union.
We know the cost of wars because we help pay for them and participate in them. Democracy assistance looks to me like cents on the dollar. Of course the great thing about democracy assistance is that ultimately countries graduate from it—and they want to graduate from it. They don't want to be conflict-ridden people, and these societies don't want to be dependants. So you are making an investment that yields dividends, which allows those countries over time to graduate, because they succeed.