Given an increasingly globalized world connected via instant news sources, terrorism has emerged as a transnational concern.  To determine the effect of terrorism on support for government retaliation, we randomly assigned 288 Peruvian and 586 U.S. undergraduates to experimentally manipulated newsflashes of terrorist attacks that varied according to target (civilian, commercial, military), impact (high, low), and frequency of attack (first, latest in a series).  A significant Target x Impact x Frequency x Gender x Country interaction emerged.  Separate analyses by country demonstrated variability in Peruvians’ retaliatory preferences and sensitivity to the economic costs of terrorism.  Unlike pre-9/11 studies, U.S. respondents did not appear to base their retaliatory preferences on temporal dimension of terrorist conflict.  We explain our findings in terms of the ecological context of each country and national narratives reflected in the schemas of its citizens, and identify their applied and research implications.