There is a substantial moralistic streak in U.S. elite attitudes about war against states perceived as evil. Among opinion leaders, death penalty supporters were substantially more likely than opponents to support the 1991 Gulf War, condone the Iraqi death toll, and favor escalating the war to...

This article tests the hypothesis that ordinary people favor punishing badly behaved foreign actors to make them “pay†for their crimes rather than purely to protect national security interests. In an undergraduate sample, people’s endorsement of the principle of retributive...