It is June 1964 in a World in which the 'swinging sixties' never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are pouring down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers like wolves upon the fold. The Shah of Iran is dead; Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; and the surviving imperial courtiers are looting the nation's riches. Meanwhile, neighbouring Iraq is disintegrating into sectarian civil war in the face of the advancing Red Army tanks.

In America, the Kennedy Administration has reneged on its treaty obligations to the United Kingdom, and turned its back on any new commitment 'east of Suez'. All that stands between two rampant Soviet tank armies and the oil of the Middle East is a handful of British tanks and a few thousand widely scattered Commonwealth troops.

In the United States the overwhelming popular mood is one of 'America First'. The 'victory' of the October War has never seemed more pyrrhic, or all the death, destruction and grief more futile than it does in the first week of June 1964. The beleaguered British and Commonwealth forces in and around the Persian Gulf must face the fact that the cavalry – in the form of the slowly rebuilding American military colossus – is not about to come to the rescue any time soon, or if at all, ever again.

Faced with a war in the Persian Gulf that it has neither the materiel, or in some quarters the will to fight, the West – what remains of it after the unmitigated disaster of the Cuban Missiles War of October 1962 – faces a humiliating, crushing catastrophe of a kind that will alter the balance of global geopolitical power for a generation.

Understandably, a lot of people are asking: was the nightmare of the October War in vain?

Only one thing is certain, the world is about to be turned upside down again.