Workers of the World United.
Following the American landings in France, and the battles that led to the destruction of the American beachhead near Brest, sweeping changes began to take place all across the world. The fighting in France was the first campaign that American reporters had unrestricted access to film and record, and the American public at home was shaken by footage of Soviet tank attacks, air-strikes and the piles of dead bodies and destroyed equipment.
On the other side of the conflict, a certain defeatist attitude was creeping into the Kremlin and STAVKA; the view that American tamk divisions could be destroyed by the dozen, but the factories that made the tanks were impervious to harm. Despite the relaxing of war-time controls across the Soviet sphere, the population was weary of nearly twenty years of warfare.
It was ironic, that days after the American fleet had sailed westwards from the French coast carrying the few thousand soldiers lucky enough to escape the beachhead, both sides began to put forward tentative overtues towards diplomacy. The meeting ground for the seeds of peace was in Venezuela, which had achived a ideological "middle-ground" in its socialist government with capitalist oil interests.
Over the weeks that followed, the details were decided upon in shady bars in Maracaibo while the war carried on. It was a political minefield, with both sides not wishing to appear on the losing side, but desiring peace as the only thing preventing more death and the possibility of an extended nuclear exchange.
By January, 1957, the terms of the Caracas Agreement were laid out. At midnight on the 22nd of January, both the Kremlin and the White House announced a cease-fire. Two days later, Brezhnev and Eisenhower flew into Caracas to sign the Agreement to divide the world between their two nations.
The world would never be the same again. The United Kingdom became a democratic republic, with the government-in-exile in Canada returning with the King in exchange for the disarmament of the British Army and Navy. Eurasia became the Soviet zone of influence, while North and South America became the American sphere. Austrailia and New Zealand were granted independance as democratic states, in return for America declaring Hawaii a demilitarized zone. Africa was to become no-man's-land; Soviet demands for the release of colonial nations resulted in the destruction of the great European empires, while America insisted on the non-involvement of the world's two superpowers.
When the Agreement came into effect on Febuary 1st, 1957, the world afterwards was generaly at peace, despite the occasional sabre rattling that followed. By the end of the decade, both the newly formed Eurasian Union of Socialist States and America and her allies had found something better to fight over than a battlefield; the Space Race started in earnest, using rockets that only a few years before would have carried nuclear bombs.
The legacy of decades of conflict did not disapear overnight. For years afterwards, wars and guerilla warfare would continue across South America and Africa as the aftershock of the Third World War. However, the United Nations, comprising of the Soviet sphere, the American influence nations, and the collection of neutral states by and large attempted to work together to stamp out the embers of war, as enough of the world had been burned already.