As America this weekend celebrates the birth of its liberty, in much of the rest of the world freedom and democracy are in retreat.

Over the past decade, authoritarian rulers have refined their techniques to stay in power, learning from each other and thinking two steps ahead of democratic forces. Unprepared for this systematic reply to the advance of democracy from the 1970s through the 1990s, democratic governments have yet to formulate a coherent response.

"A global political recession" is how Tom Melia describes the current state of affairs. Melia is deputy director of Freedom House, a nonprofit that annually measures the state of liberty in every nation -- and that has found "more countries seeing declines in overall freedom than gains" in recent years, Melia said last week.
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So at decade's end, the correlation of forces, as the Communists used to say, looks bleak. Three assertive powers -- China, Russia and Iran -- not only resist democratization but actively seek to disseminate their model of authoritarian rule in their spheres of influence. Europe, the engine of democratization of the 1990s, looks inward, more interested in appeasing Russia than reforming it. Newer or less wealthy democracies such as South Africa, Turkey, Brazil and India seem stuck in anti-colonial mind-sets that discourage cooperation to promote democracy. And the Obama administration remains skittish about adopting a "freedom agenda" that its predecessor had tarnished in the minds of many Democrats.