The Melbourne Conference
The entire world was fixated on the Melbourne Accords. In attendance were amazingly the same Big Five nations from the end of World War II: France, Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States. Amusingly, the two hangovers brought over to the Melbourne Conference were French Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle, as well as Special Advisor to the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Prime Minister Gaitskell made the clever decision to invite an ailing Churchill along, just because he knew he had a rapport with De Gaulle.
In contrast, President Li was obviously not willing to bring Chiang Kai-Shek along, who was still trapped in Mukden. President Li really didn't feel willing to take anyone along besides his close friend, General Bai Chongxi. His rule was incredibly tenuous and arguably the only reason no forces loyal to Chiang launched a counter-coup was that they were terrified of the international situation, considering that a nuclear weapon had literally been dropped on a city in China.
Most of the nations also brought on experienced diplomatic hands. The British brought R.A. Butler, the Chinese brought Wellington Koo (who had famously orchestrated the League of Nations condemnation of Imperial Japan in 1931), the Soviets brought Foreign Minister Molotov (famous for the eponymous pact with Ribbentrop), the French brought Georges Bidault (who helped secure a French UNSC seat). In contrast, the Americans shocked the rest of the nations for being so incredibly unprepared. JFK had brought with him the new Secretary of State, Clark Clifford, who although being an incredibly well-connected Washington superlawyer, was not an expert on foreign affairs. JFK was an avid reader and learner (or well, more accurately became one), but he still wasn't familiar with foreign policy. JFK choosing not to attend McCarthy war council meetings helped shield him from McCarthy's wrath, but it also meant that he didn't quite know what was going on. He often made mistakes about the exact effective line of control, especially in China and Yugoslavia (in his defense, China was quite confusing).
Beria for his part had been willing to make peace on extremely favorable grounds to the United States. Originally, he was planning on evacuating Yugoslavia and even turning over North China and Korea to the Americans. His original goal was to maintain control of Finland, partly to hide evidence of his own war crimes. However, the last minute-offensive by Mao rapidly changed the situation in Asia, and he decided to bring Molotov at the last moment, who he knew wouldn't budge on China. Molotov's original offer shocked the Western allies when he demanded a revision of the Chinese border to the South and no changes to Korea. President Li, eager for peace, pushed back on Molotov's offer, by suggesting a return to prewar borders in China, with no changes to Korea. The Americans, unaware of Li's proposal, missed their opportunity to try to revise the borders of Korea back as the Soviets immediately accepted. The Republic of Korea was left...entirely on the island of Jeju.
Trying to claw some kind of concession from the Soviets in exchange for the loss of Korea, the Americans immediately demanded a total Soviet withdrawal from Yugoslavia. Unaware of the ground on the Yugoslav front, the Soviets responded with a very surprising counter-offer. Almost as if it had been timed by the Soviets (it was), Metodija Andonov-Cento, the new General-Secretary of the League of Communists in Macedonia, had taken that position by launching an intra-party coup against what (little) was left of the Macedonian Communists. He denounced Milovan Djilas as a revisionist (he was), attacking his supporters in Macedonia. Beria had planned this out well-ahead of time, even offering Andronov-Cento the rulership of a Greater Bulgaria (which was leaderless). Had they been given time to respond, the detachment of Macedonia (which went from the poorest to richest region in Yugoslavia because the Yugoslav Army had been on the offensive against Bulgaria, thus sparing Macedonia of bombing) could have been reversed. In the tight time constraints of the conference, the Americans reluctantly agreed. This proved to be a huge loss because after the annihilation of Sarajevo, Yugoslav refugees largely flooded towards Macedonia - the new government refused to allow them to return. The Americans were able to demand only a relatively weak concession - the "division" of Turkey that left the Communists with only a tiny slice of the country in the far east. This was viewed as fait accompli because the Soviets had already built a railroad there. This also brokered a disagreement between the British and French delegates, as the French left the Yugoslav breakout session far happier than the British.
The final diplomatic stumbling block of the conference was the status of Finland. Beria obviously demanded that all of Finland be returned to a Soviet sphere of influence. The Americans objected, claiming that the Soviets had violated the Paris Peace ending the Continuation War and that the Soviets ought to retreat. This final issue took the longest to resolve and it was only resolved after a surprising incident that infuriated Beria. Bela Kiraly had launched a bloodless coup, putting him in charge of most Hungarian institutions, upon where he immediately announced Hungarian withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact. Crippled remnants of the Yugoslav Army immediately flooded into Hungary to reinforce him, as if to dare the Soviets to continue the war against Yugoslavia. Humiliated, Beria did nothing, but demanded that Finland be left as a permanent cease-fire, with the Finnish-government-in-exile being allowed to remain in the Aland Islands (it's not like Beria could take them anyways). The British immediately accepted the offer, which forced the hands of the French, and thus the Americans. The Soviets didn't try to demand Hungary remain neutral, because their earlier gambit with Finnish had ended poorly. In the eyes of Soviet war planners now, every neutral country in Europe was an enemy.
All in all, had it not been for the Hungarian humiliation, Beria could have sold the conference as a stunning victory. Expanding Soviet influence across most of Korea, Macedonia, and most of Finland could in theory be viewed as a "victory", especially as none of the fighting took place on Soviet territory. However, the loss of an actual Warsaw Pact nation threatened to unravel the entire Warsaw Pact, if it not for the fact that East Germany was still under Soviet occupation, the Czechs were loyal, Bulgaria was under Soviet control, Poland was occupied, and really the only country that worried the Soviet Union was Romania. Still, the worry was there and with the defection of Hungary, it was decided that a larger show of strength had to be made. Luckily for Beria and unluckily for everyone else, that was already secretly being negotiated with President Kennedy.
At the end of the day, the Soviet Union wasn't actually going to let a nuclear attack go unanswered. In one of the most heavily classified documents in the entire American intelligence archives, President Kennedy and President Beria directly bargained, face-to-face, on acceptable Soviet reprisal targets. By this point, Kennedy had known Beria had largely gotten the better of him at the Melbourne Conference, so Kennedy sought to negotiate him down. Beria would obviously keep his pledge of no reprisals against the United States and he agreed to expand that pledge to no reprisals against any member of NATO, considering that North China was not yet a member of the Warsaw Pact. Although kept secret, most leaders guessed that some sort of discussion about a Soviet reprisal took place, simply because it seemed that 1) all of the terms had already been agreed to and 2) Beria and Kennedy had both flown back home without signing the Melbourne Accords, instructing to their subordinates that the Accords would be executed immediately upon...something happening. Across the world, national leaders went to sleep, mostly hoping that it wouldn't be them.
