ARE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE PRETTY PRUDENT - PUBLIC RESPONSES TO US USES OF FORCE, 1950-1988

A new consensus has emerged in recent years that the public responds t o foreign affairs in reasonable ways. Bruce Jentleson (1992) has contr ibuted to this optimistic revisionism, arguing that the public is ''pr etty prudent'' in the ''post post-Vietnam period.'' The American peopl e, he suggests, now discriminate between using the military to force f oreign policy restraint on aggressive adversaries and using it to coer ce internal political change. We test Jentleson's hypothesis, with sev eral theoretically interesting controls, using regression analyses of all thirty-eight major uses of force that occurred during a U.S. forei gn policy crisis, 1950-1988. We do not find support for Jentleson's pe riodization of the post-World War II era; but our analyses do indicate that the American people have, throughout the postwar years, been mor e supportive of using military force to resist aggression than to engi neer internal change in other countries.