Today’s strikes on Venezuela and the reported capture of the country’s President Nicolas Maduro is the “most strident foreign military intervention” of US President Donald Trump’s presidency, according to CNN Chief International Security Correspondent Nick Paton Walsh.

“Look, this is an utterly startling development. I only think of comparables to the operation against Osama bin Laden… and the capture of Saddam Hussein back almost over 20 years ago now. This is certainly the most strident foreign military intervention of President Trump’s… presidency so far,” he told CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen this morning.

“And it shows, really, that Trump was serious in his desire to see Maduro gone, that he’s managed to, it seems, execute that in a matter of hours through a particularly violent moment over Caracas skies,” Paton Walsh continued.

Maduro “is a president with some significant assistance from Russia and China, snatched from his capital in the middle of the night by the United States military,” he said, calling today’s events “a startling moment” that “shows the level of freedom with which President Trump believes he operates globally,” he said.

The military occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany began with the German annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, continued with the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and by the end of 1944 extended to all parts of Czechoslovakia.

Following the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 and the Munich Agreement in September of that same year, Adolf Hitler annexed the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia on 1 October, giving Germany control of the extensive Czechoslovak border fortifications in this area. The incorporation of the Sudetenland into Germany left the rest of Czechoslovakia ("Rest-Tschechei" [a]) with a largely indefensible northwestern border. Also a Polish-majority borderland region of Trans-Olza which was annexed by Czechoslovakia in 1919, was occupied and annexed by Poland following the two-decade long territorial dispute. Finally the First Vienna Award gave to Hungary the southern territories of Slovakia and Carpathian Ruthenia, mostly inhabited by Hungarians.

The Slovak State broke off on 14 March 1939, and Hungary annexed the remainder of Carpathian Ruthenia the following day. On 15 March, during a visit to Berlin, the Czechoslovak president Emil Hácha was coerced into signing away his country's independence.