I feel for you gingerfold. All of us running our own businesses have had similar experiences.
When I was manager at OHS our business was 100% to Turkey until the army takeover when we had almost our entire fleet parked up on wasteland at Rainham for several weeks until we were able to diversify and make the decision to accept business from forwarders which we had not done before, and run our trucks through to Tehran, Baghdad and Kuwait.
At Orient our business started with Iran which then went down the tubes but luckily for us we were able to switch to Iraq which was a rising market at the time. Then came the Iran/Iraq war and we immediately took the decision to sell all our expensive company cars and introduce a redundancy package for some of our staff. That was a panic measure but interestingly enough that year became our most profitable as we had cut our overhead to the bone,(including my brand new Discovery which was sold at fifteen days old at a profit!)), and found we were able to make more money from the new contracts we took on into Eastern Europe for example and we concentrated heavily on exhibition work which we had only dabbled in before.
We then headed a consortium which signed the world’s biggest freight contract in Iraq, the PC2 contract, and were about to head for Baghdad when we received a telex asking us to delay our visit. A few days later Saddam marched into Kuwait and all our Iraq business came to an abrupt halt and the PC2 contract vanished into thin air!
We had no option but to cut once again and regroup finding business booming into Eastern Europe, North Africa and then the Gulf.
So I hope it’s heartening to learn that yours is by no means a unique experience and whatever decisions you need to make, either to grasp the nettle and cut your fleet or to find alternative work, I hope all will work out for you.