Next month marks one year since the Afghanistan war’s collapse. Will President Biden rise to the moment or tout it as a victory, causing Americans to recoil at their tone-deaf leader?

Administration officials told CNN that “the commemorations will be careful not to be unduly celebratory”; instead, they will “talk about the service and sacrifice….”

That may be the script, but Mr. Biden rarely sticks to those.

This president, who came into office by lifting President Carter’s post-Watergate campaign pledge, “I will never lie to you,” not only denies reality — he does so without seeming to know it.

Now he is desperate for a win — real or imagined — as inflation, crime, the border, gasoline prices, and a host of other failures tear into his presidency like racoons into a trash bag. Since Mr. Biden’s skid in the polls began with bungling Afghanistan’s final act, the commemoration will make his natural compulsion to put lipstick on pigs impossible to resist.  

Take Mr. Biden’s standard line that the vast majority of citizens supported ending America’s longest war, and so he deserves praise for delivering it. Are we really to applaud the humiliating evacuation from the embassy rooftop in Kabul, the exact Vietnam redux that Mr. Biden promised would not happen?

What of the billions of dollars in military equipment gifted to the Taliban, the 13 service members killed in a bombing after 18 death-free months, the slaughtered children in a drone strike, or the Afghans dropped from planes in flight?

We can both be glad the war is over and upset with that conclusion. We can be in awe of our military’s sacrifice and disgusted with leadership. Mr. Biden, however, grows angry when such subjects are broached, and even simple questions push his buttons.

Just last week, when a reporter asked about a New York Times/Siena College poll that showed two-thirds of Democrats don’t want him to run again, Mr. Biden snapped, “Read the polls, Jack!”

He then lectured the man, whose name is not Jack, saying “92 percent would vote for me.” Well, that wasn’t the issue at hand, and everyone knew it. Even Newsweek rated the boast as false.

The American people may forgive being spun like that if it’s for a good reason, but when Mr. Biden touts Afghanistan as a win, it’s too obvious and self-serving. It’s also a desecration of those who died in battle or gave up years of their lives to help a people on the other side of the world, while rooting out the terrorists who slaughtered their fellow Americans us on 9/11.

At a press conference after another foreign policy failure, the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy handled the situation with aplomb that Mr. Biden would do well to copy for the commemoration. That JFK maintained his patience with journalists goes without saying, but he also quoted the truism that “victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.”

That phrase was perfect politics. It portrayed him as the lone one willing to take responsibility, because that’s the job the people entrusted to his care. It also set the premise that plenty of others shared blame for the bungled attempt to liberate communist Cuba, even if the buck stopped on the Resolute Desk.

Kennedy did not blame his predecessor, either, accepting that he made changes to the plan he inherited that helped doom it, exactly as Mr. Biden’s did.

For 20 years, Afghanistan swallowed up young lives and literal pallets of cash. Americans remained hopeful throughout because our nation still believes that tomorrow will be better than yesterday. In that sweet spot lies Mr. Biden’s best path next month. He can praise the sacrifice of our military and at last deliver the unity he promised on the campaign trail.

He can trust the people he leads to know that he doesn’t shoulder all the blame for last year’s calamity without overselling himself as blameless.

This tone-deaf president can finally hear our chorus of voices, and — as the last father of the Afghan orphan — resist the urge to claim victory, because only our brave men and women in uniform deserve any laurels for that war.