It is April 1964 in a World in which the swinging sixties never happened. Two Soviet tank armies have fallen on Iran and are poised to pour down from the Zagros Mountains onto the Iraqi floodplains of the Tigris and the Euphrates like wolves upon the fold.

The Shah is dead, Tehran has been destroyed by a nuclear strike; while in Iraq there has been a coup d'état, and civil war has broken out. All that stands between the Red Army and mastery of the Persian Gulf are a few dozen British tanks and penny packets of troops.

The whole Middle East is in turmoil. The Suez Canal is blocked, and the British staging bases in Malta and Cyprus are wrecked.

In the United States the 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 second week of April 1964.

Now, confronted by a totally unexpected war that it has neither the materiel, or in some quarters the will to fight, the West – what remains of it after the disaster of the Cuban Missiles – faces a humiliating, crushing catastrophe of a kind that might alter the balance of global geopolitical power for a generation.

It seems that the nightmare of the October War was in vain?

Only one thing is certain; that the World will soon be turned upside down again.