The popular desire to exact retribution on an adversary is an attractive resource for American presidents to utilise when mobilising support for war. While prior scholarship has identified the critical role of political leaders' communications in making retribution salient to the public, a fine-grained theory of why, how, and when leaders are likely to employ retributive concepts is yet to be developed. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive theory of retributive rhetoric. The theory draws on multidisciplinary research on ordinary people's intuitions and decision principles concerning moral blameworthiness and demonstrates how and when U.S. presidents intuitively employ these concepts in their rhetoric directed to the popular audience. It is argued that when a president wishes to intervene militarily, morally salient harms committed against geographically and culturally distant states are most likely to elicit retributive rhetoric. This thesis also argues that creating a sense of popular moral outrage and an attendant desire for retribution may help explain the popularity of aerial bombing strikes as a foreign policy response. This work is distinguished from prior scholarship in several ways. It integrates many related but disparate strands of investigation into a unifying theory of retributive rhetoric; it models the performative display of retributive rhetoric as a novel form of "emotional mobilisation"; and it departs from the traditional convention of conceptualising international punishment as revenge, instead focusing on the more psychologically accurate theory of retribution. The expectations and implications of the theory are explored through qualitative analysis of three case studies involving military intervention by the United States: entry into World War II following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin crisis precipitating the first official use of military force against North Vietnam, and the 1991 Persian Gulf War following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.