With July 4 upon us, American troops are overseas defending freedom and democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of us have been speaking for the idea that this struggle will eventually be taken to Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea — not necessarily with American troops, but with other support. Some skeptics voice doubts about whether such countries or cultures are fit or “ready” for freedom or democracy.

On this topic the Declaration of Independence whose issuance in 1776 we celebrate this weekend was emphatic. It said, “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”

One of the greatest of the founders, Samuel Adams, was even more explicit in his own writings. “The love of liberty is interwoven in the soul of man,” he wrote. “However irrational, ungenerous, and unsocial the love of liberty may be in a rude savage, he is capable of being enlightened by experience, reflection, education, and civil and political institutions.”

Adams, whose words we have been studying, said the American Revolution had given the world a “lesson, drawn from experience, that all countries may be free.” And he said that America’s example testified “that by patience, fortitude and perseverance the iron rod can be wrested from the arm of a tyrant, and that all nations may be free, if they will magnanimously contend for their liberty.”