Whereas, on January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points address to a joint session of Congress called for the free autonomous development of the peoples of Austria-Hungary and became the basis for the founding of an independent Czech-Slovak nation-state; Whereas, on September 3, 1918, the United States recognized the Czecho-Slovak National Council in Paris as a de facto government at war with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires; Whereas, on October 14, 1918, the Czecho-Slovak National Council formed a provisional government, which declared its independence from Austria-Hungary on October 18, 1918; Whereas the peoples of the present-day Czech Republic and the present-day Slovak Republic proclaimed their independence in the common state of the Republic of Czechoslovakia on October 28 and October 30, 1918; Whereas, on November 12, 1918, the United States and Czechoslovakia established formal diplomatic relations; Whereas the United States never recognized Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Czech Sudetenland in October 1938, the subsequent establishment of a German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia, or the creation of the German puppet Slovak state in March 1939; Whereas the Slovak and Czech resistance movements against the Nazi occupation, with the support of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, launched the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944 and the Prague uprising in May 1945, accelerating the collapse of the Third Reich and demonstrating the courage, patriotism, and freedom-loving spirit of the Czech and Slovak peoples; Whereas the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia seized power from the democratically elected Government of Czechoslovakia in February 1948; Whereas, on August 20, 1968, twenty Soviet and Warsaw Pact divisions invaded Czechoslovakia in order to crush the Prague Spring , a peaceful popular movement calling for greater political and economic liberty that followed the appointment of Alexander Dubcek as First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party