Some stories are too good to check, and some myths are too perfect to bust. We’ve seen that dynamic in action all month, as GOP presidential candidates trot out their favorite foreign policy anecdote: the Parable of the Hostages.

The story goes that on the day of his inauguration, in January 1981, President Reagan convinced the Iranian regime to free the American Embassy hostages more or less just by glaring harshly in the direction of Tehran, which quailed in the face of his unyielding toughness and released the Americans immediately.

According to this appealing version of recent history, Iran had kept the hostages during the Carter administration because they knew Carter was "weak," but they so feared Reagan’s red-blooded American resolve that they acquiesced the second he was sworn into office. The moral of the story, therefore, is that negotiating with Iran or any of America’s enemies is a sign of harmful weakness, whereas refusal to negotiate shows Reagan-like strength that will protect Americans.

It will perhaps not surprise you to learn that this version of history is not remotely accurate. While there is a kernel of truth — the hostages were, in fact, released on the day Reagan was inaugurated — the rest of the story bears no resemblance to the myth that has risen around it. But the bigger question is not just whether the story is true (it is not), but why it is so appealing to the current GOP candidates. The answer tells us a lot about the state of Republican Party foreign policy — and what the candidates think Republican primary voters want to hear.

Rubio and Cruz: If I'm elected, I'll have Tehran-controlling superpowers just like Reagan did

You know a foreign policy myth is having a moment when two competing GOP candidates trot it out almost simultaneously on different Sunday news shows.

On January 16, Marco Rubio said on Meet the Press that Obama had "put a price on the head of every American abroad" by allowing a prisoner swap in order to free Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian and three other US citizens held by Iran. "Our enemies now know that if you can capture an American, you can get something meaningful in exchange for it."

"When I become president," Rubio claimed, "it will be like Ronald Reagan, where as soon as he took office, the hostages were released from Iran," because "our adversaries around the world will know that America is no longer under the command of someone weak like Barack Obama."

Ted Cruz gave a remarkably similar statement the same day on Fox News, saying that the temporary seizure of the US sailors by Iran was "the direct result of the weakness of this presidency," and that "it’s worth remembering, this same nation, Iran, in 1981 released our hostages the day Ronald Reagan was sworn into office."

The problem with this story: Iran released the embassy hostages because of Carter's negotiations, not in spite of them

The boring and emotionally unsatisfying truth is that the Carter administration secured the Americans' release through protracted negotiations — and by releasing millions of dollars to the Iranian government.

A little background is probably in order here. On November 4, 1979, a militant student group called the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line stormed the US Embassy in Tehran, occupied the grounds, and took the more than 60 American diplomats and embassy staff there prisoner.

The hostages were held for 444 days. During that period, the Carter administration tried to secure their release through a military operation, which failed catastrophically, and then through a series of secret negotiations.

The negotiations were protracted and very messy, largely because of tensions between Iran's hard-liners and more moderate factions within their government. On several occasions, the Carter administration believed it had reached a final agreement, only to see the deal scuttled at the last minute by Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

But Carter and his negotiators kept working through the very end of his presidency, and eventually, at the last possible moment, they succeeded. On January 19, 1981, the US and Iran signed the Algiers Accords, an agreement brokered by the Algerian government that secured the hostages' release in exchange for concessions by the US, including sanctions relief, the release of frozen Iranian assets, and the creation of the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal that would remove cases against Iran from US courts.

The hostages were released the following day, January 20, 1981 — the day Reagan was inaugurated.

In other words, Rubio and Cruz's version of events is straight-up false. The hostages were released in exchange for sizable concessions from the United States — exactly the sort of process they deride as weak — and not because Ronald Reagan was a tough and scary gentleman whose mere presence in the Oval Office panicked Khomeini into capitulating.

Why did the Iranians wait until Reagan took office to release the hostages?

It is true that it was Reagan, not Carter, who got to inform the nation that the hostages had left Iran and were on their way to safety in Germany. So why did that happen?

The answer, according to Mark Bowden's book Guests of the Ayatollah, which painstakingly chronicles the hostage negotiations and release, is that the Iranian regime hated Carter. Because he was in office at the time of Iran's 1979 revolution, Carter became fixed in the Iranian public imagination as the personification of the "great satan" itself. So, Bowden writes, Iran had timed the release to deprive him of the final satisfaction of announcing the negotiations' success.

"The Iranians were deliberately stalling," Bowden writes. "They had decided to accept the deal and send the hostages home, but they had also decided to deny Carter the satisfaction of seeing it happen on his watch."

Gary Sick, who was Carter's chief aide on Iran during the hostage crisis, claimed in his book October Surprise that Reagan's campaign manager, William Casey, reached out to the Iranians to ask them to delay releasing the hostages until after the November elections. But even if that did happen (and it's worth noting that Sick, as a Carter administration official, had reason to be bitter toward Reagan's campaign staff), there's little evidence that Casey's overtures would have actually affected the timing of the release.

According to Bowden, several of the Iranian officials involved in the negotiations confirmed that Casey had reached out to them, but said that his efforts hadn't actually affected the talks. Carter was already so unpopular in Tehran that the regime didn't need any further incentive to torpedo his electoral chances.

Indeed, if Reagan did have an effect on the hostages' release, it was to make the Iranians more invested in Carter's negotiations. On the campaign trail, Reagan insisted that he would never negotiate with Tehran. The Iranians thus believed, perhaps correctly, that making a deal with Carter would be the best way to ensure that they benefited from releasing the hostages.

According to Bowden, Reagan ended up becoming "bad cop" to Carter's "good cop" — a way to force the Iranians to negotiate in good faith by claiming that a deal had to be done before Carter left office.

But even if that good cop/bad cop dynamic was ultimately an effective tactic, it's not clear this was deliberate, and it was a far cry from the picture that Rubio and Cruz paint. In their telling, the negotiations were a useless show of weakness that ultimately failed, and Reagan's toughness won the day. But to the extent that Reagan's "bad cop" toughness influenced the hostage release at all, it was by encouraging the negotiations — the opposite, in other words, of what they are claiming.

Why Republican presidential candidates love this story so much

The real question here isn't whether this story is a myth. (It is definitely, definitely a myth). Rather, it's why GOP candidates find this myth so appealing. Why do Republicans love to tell a fabricated tale about a political crisis that was resolved decades ago? After all, it's not just Cruz and Rubio now: Mitt Romney also told the story during the 2012 election.

The answer is that this is not really a story about hostages, or Reagan, or even Iran. It's a story about the storytellers' beliefs about the value of American power and the best way to wield it — and about what they think GOP voters want to hear.

Viewed in the most charitable light, the candidates are expressing a real and deeply held belief about the dangers of negotiation. Earlier this week, Max Fisher termed this the "hegemonist" view: that US hegemony promotes global security and protects the US-led liberal order, and that negotiations — even successful ones — threaten that hegemony by legitimizing other countries' challenges to American dominance.

The story of Reagan and the hostages is the perfect example to support that policy, because it neatly sidesteps the main objection to the hegemonist view: namely, that sometimes negotiations get us what we want. The story of Carter's negotiations going nowhere but Reagan's resolve getting results, if it were actually true, would be the perfect response to that objection — a way to claim that the upside of negotiations is really a downside after all, and that pigheaded stubbornness is actually a cunningly brilliant strategy.

And because of that, it's also easy to see why this story would appeal to GOP voters. One obvious benefit, of course, is that it's a way to bash President Obama, whose negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal have been one of the signature foreign policy accomplishments of his second term.

But the GOP primary has also shown that voters have a huge appetite for promises of a return to American strength and greatness. Viewed in that light, bashing Obama's willingness to negotiate is a way to explain to anxious voters why the world feels so frightening — because they have a president who is personally weak when he should be strong. It's a way of appealing especially to those who feel personally invested in associating themselves with American power, and who therefore want to believe that America is strong enough that it never needs to negotiate.

The story of Reagan and the hostages is the perfect way to appeal to those feelings, because it promises that with a strong leader, America will immediately return to strength and greatness.

It's a way of promising that, if elected, the candidate will deliver not just faraway foreign policy victories but also feelings of personal pride and strength to any American who wishes to see himself as part of something powerful enough to dictate terms to the world.

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