Of the many catchphrases the Bush administration has given us — from “compassionate conservatism” and “no child left behind” to “regime change” and “axis of evil” — perhaps none is more dangerously intoxicating than the “freedom agenda.”

An international report released last week underscores the point.

The phrase is supposed to summarize the overarching goal of President Bush’s foreign policy. But like “regime change” — a happy-talk gloss for what happens when one country invades another, decapitates it and occupies it, and then tries to pacify it and rebuild its civic institutions from the ground up, “freedom agenda” deceives speaker and listener alike with its self-flattering grandeur and easy moralism.

Use it often enough and you’re lulled into thinking that something highly complicated and dubious will be, in practice, simple and straightforward.

Yet there’s nothing straightforward about making the domestic liberty of other nations the principal purpose of American foreign policy. That’s the message — though definitely not an intentional one — of this year’s annual survey of political rights around the globe issued by the admirable do-gooders at Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization based in Washington.

They have compiled their survey since 1972, tracing the condition of human freedom from the darkest days of communism’s advance into Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe — an advance that only ended with the revival of American military and diplomatic power in the early 1980s.

In 1981, researchers at Freedom House graded one out of every three countries “free.” Today nearly half of the world’s countries qualify as “free,” meaning they allow competitive elections, a free press, and room for civic life to flourish independent of government control.

By far the most dramatic advance in freedom came in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the liberation of its satellite nations.

Wondrous as it was, this period had an odd psychological effect among certain American foreign-policy enthusiasts. It led them to imagine that there was inevitability to the march of freedom — the same deterministic faith that Marxists once shared, only in reverse and with a happy ending.

In President Bush’s second inaugural address, when he told the world to brace itself for the “greatest achievements in the history of freedom,” the faith found its most florid expression. It found its most practical expression in the invasion of Iraq.

Yet now the eruption of liberty at the end of the Cold War is beginning to look less like a pattern for the future than an historical anomaly.

“When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union imploded, there was a lot of low-hanging fruit,” says Freedom House’s director of research and author of this year’s report, Arch Puddington.

“In the Baltics, in Eastern Europe, these were countries ripe for democracy, culturally and politically and historically, with close proximity to Western Europe,” he says. “Now we’re left with much harder cases, in China, Africa, the Middle East.”

Mr. Puddington makes clear that Freedom House emphatically endorses the administration’s promotion of democracy — “and we hope that subsequent administrations build on it,” he says.

Yet the cold facts in this year’s report only confirm how formidable a task it is. Since the late 1990s, Mr. Puddington says, we have entered a period of “freedom stagnation.”

“Since 1998,” he writes, “the proportion of countries designated as free has remained essentially unchanged at 46 percent.”

In fact, the past year has seen a global decline in freedom. By Freedom House’s calculation, in 2006, 33 countries saw an erosion of political rights within their own borders, including South Africa, Taiwan, and Argentina. Only 18 countries gained ground, among them Indonesia and Mexico.

Part of the problem on a global scale is what Mr. Puddington calls “authoritarian pushback.” Russia is a prime example.

Not too long ago, Mr. Puddington says, “we had expectations that Russia would emerge as a reasonably consolidated democratic system. Instead, the opposite is happening.”

Yet from country to country, the backsliding takes subtler forms than it might have in the past, when oppression was a brutish matter of mass arrests, torture, and military crackdowns.

In these countries today, as in Russia, elections can proceed with many of the niceties observed. Yet repression grows through less strident, quasi-legalistic means: using tax laws to harass political opponents, intimidating companies that advertise in the opposition press, and jailing critical journalists on charges of slander and libel.

“In terms of actual people being killed,” Mr. Puddington says, “there’s been progress. But now the oppression is much more complicated and incremental — people don’t realize it’s happening until power is consolidated and the opposition is destroyed.”

In pushing the freedom agenda, President Bush liked to remind listeners that the desire for freedom burns forever in the human heart. That’s a metaphysical point, certainly poetic, and maybe even true. But the impulse to oppression burns there, too.

Indeed, the experience of the last quarter-century proves that building a free society entails much more than holding elections. It requires vast, earth-moving changes in legal arrangements and, even more daunting, the eradication of harmful cultural attitudes and the inculcation of new values. These are complications that advocates of the freedom agenda, in their salad days, seemed happy to ignore.

By the way, Freedom House over the years has usually designated Iraq as “not free.” Now, several years into the freedom agenda, Iraq’s designation is unchanged.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.