The Biden Administration released its review of the2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Americans are unlikely to fall for 12 pages of narrative gaslighting, and the buck for that dark episode stops with President Biden.

The White House document “outlines the key decisions and challenges” associated with the departure of U.S. troops in August in 2021. Mr. Biden “believed the right thing for the country” was withdrawing all U.S. forces, the White House says, even as it blames the debacle on–wait for it–Donald Trump.

Mr. Biden’s “choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created” by Mr. Trump, the report says. President Trump “provided no plans” for conducting a final withdrawal even though the former President had agreed to leave under an ill-advised agreement with the Taliban.

Mr. Trump did want to pull troops out, and he probably would have, but Mr. Biden didn’t run for President to affirm Mr. Trump’s policies. Mr. Biden ran on being the adult in the White House, and he was under no obligation to oblige the Taliban, who had failed to honor their side of the deal with Mr. Trump. Many of Mr. Biden’s advisers tried to tell him as much, including U.S. military general officers and European allies, who preferred a residual force of a few thousand allied troops.

The White House apologia contends that “the speed with which the Taliban took over” showed a few thousand troops were insufficient, conveniently omitting Mr. Biden’s decisions that accelerated the country’s descent into chaos. Mr. Biden pulled the air support and maintenance contracting Afghan troops relied on to fight, and then chided them as unwilling to sacrifice. Political constraints on troop numbers pushed the U.S. military to shut down the air field at Bagram Air Base, a “strategic unforced error,” as a Senate report last year called it. Afghan allies literally woke up one morning at Bagram to find U.S. troops had gone.

More alarming than its fake history is the White House’s inability to connect the dots between the U.S. surrender in Afghanistan and increasing world disorder. The U.S. is not more respected after surrendering to the Taliban, despite the heavy firepower the Administration deploys to make that case: “multiple opinion surveys.”

You can draw a straight line between the debacle in Afghanistan and the failure to deter Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine. Yet the only lessons the Biden Administration learned are the wrong ones. “In Ukraine,” the report notes, “we decided to evacuate personnel nearly two weeks before Russia’s invasion,” apparently unaware that this was one more signal to Mr. Putin that he could roll in without fear of a U.S. response.

The report’s fable is that the U.S. has been freed up to focus on Russia and China: “It is hard to imagine” the U.S. “would have been able to lead the response to these challenges as successfully” if troops were still in Afghanistan. But the ugly, desperate scenes in Kabul communicated to the world that America was in retreat, and the consequences of that message include Saudi doubts that the U.S. is a reliable partner and increasing aggression from Beijing in the Taiwan Strait.

Mr. Biden’s approval rating sank into the red after the catastrophe in Kabul and has never fully recovered, and voters understand whose decisions drove the horrible images they saw on the news. Mr. Biden’s report trumpets his “deliberate, intensive, rigorous and inclusive decision-making process” in Afghanistan.

That makes it all worse because it underscores that the problem was the final decision–that is, Joe Biden’s awful judgment.

— Wall Street Journal