The world is stocking its Pantry. Are we?

A few weeks ago, a government booklet started landing on doormats across Ireland. It explains what to do when the lights go out, and it is being sent to roughly 2.2 million households. Finland plans to post about 3.5 million printed guides covering crises and even drone threats. In Britain, a three-year “Be Ready” campaign began on 22 October, asking families to plan for at least three days without essential services.

The Pentagon is thinking along the same lines, only bigger. Reports say major US bases would be expected to run their own power, water, fuel and communications for at least 90 days. One outlet points out that the 90-day benchmark hasn’t been confirmed by any published directive, so the details deserve some caution. The direction of travel, though, is hard to miss.

Stack these headlines together and you get the kind of viral social media post now doing the rounds, which shouts that the world is preparing for the worst. I think that framing is overblown. But the instinct behind it deserves a serious look.

The list of governments giving this advice is longer than most people realise, and it goes well beyond the “largest countries” the viral post boasts about. In Europe it now covers the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic states, and by most compilations the Baltic states, Poland, Austria and Switzerland as well. Smaller countries have joined too. Belgium launched a four-year campaign in April urging households to cope alone for at least 72 hours. Luxembourg is handing out about 300,000 copies of a 72-hour guide from 14 October. In Portugal, the interior ministry and the National Republican Guard (GNR), the country’s gendarmerie, recommend keeping a 72-hour emergency kit. Over all of them sits the European Union, which urges citizens in every member state to be self-sufficient for at least three days.

Outside Europe, a compilation by the US news magazine Newsweek lists the United States, Canada, Japan, Taiwan, Israel, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, among others. A few entries need a careful reading, though. India’s disaster authority advises a kit but gives no timeframe. South Africa’s example is advice from the city of Cape Town, not national policy. And the Australian appeal in the viral post came from the Australian Red Cross, not the government.

Much of this advice is old news. The European Commission asked citizens in March 2025 to keep 72 hours’ worth of emergency supplies. Germany’s guidance suggests 10 days of food and five days of water, and the Nordic countries advise one to two weeks.

What has changed is who is talking. These warnings no longer come only from civil-protection offices. They come from spy chiefs. The director of GCHQ, Britain’s signals intelligence agency, says Russia is “relentlessly targeting” critical infrastructure and democracy in the UK and across Europe. Norway’s Police Security Service (PST) warns that Russian intelligence may see benefit in sabotage operations there in 2026. The US intelligence community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment says China remains the most persistent cyber threat to US infrastructure, while Russia poses an advanced and persistent one.

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Read closely, none of them predicts a sudden invasion or a global collapse. The danger they describe is quieter: sabotage, cyberattacks, drones and disinformation aimed at the systems we only think about once they fail. Military planners work from a blunt assumption that in any major future war, global supply chains will break.

Modern life hangs on a few invisible threads. Electricity runs the water pumps, the pumps keep hospitals going, mobile networks carry payments, and payments buy food. Cut one thread and the others strain. When the lights went out across Spain and Portugal in April 2025, more than 60 million people lost power, and several governments suddenly found a new sense of urgency. In Britain, only 13 per cent of people surveyed felt their household was ready for an emergency. That number is the real story. Governments know a country’s resilience is the sum of its households, and that emergency services can’t reach everyone at once. The stated aim is to free responders to help those in greatest need.

Pakistanis don’t need a lecture on disruption. We lived through the 2022 floods that swallowed whole districts. We remember the countrywide blackout of January 2023, when a grid failure left the nation in the dark. We know load-shedding as a daily routine, and we know how fast a price shock travels from the wholesale market to the kitchen table. So the question isn’t whether the next crisis will come. It’s whether we will meet it with a plan or with improvisation. Does a family in Islamabad or Rawalpindi know what three days without power, water and mobile signal would actually look like? Do our schools and hospitals run drills and keep backup plans? Does the state speak to citizens about preparedness before an emergency, or only after one? And are our banking and utility systems protected against the cyber threats other countries’ agencies keep flagging? Preparedness isn’t a Western import. It’s a habit we already half-practise and rarely write down.

There is a wrong way to react to all this, and it involves panic-buying, forwarding rumours and reading a viral list of flags as a countdown. China’s 2021 call for households to stock up on necessities is a cautionary tale. It sent some people rushing to the supermarkets until state media said the message had been over-read. Belgium’s interior minister, Bernard Quintin, got the tone right when he said his campaign was not meant to cause alarm.

The sensible way is far less dramatic. The official UK checklist asks for drinking water, food that needs no cooking, essential medication, a torch, spare batteries, a radio, a charged power bank and basic hygiene supplies, and British guidance also suggests keeping some cash. Add a family plan about where to meet and whom to call, photocopies of key documents, and a neighbour you know by name. On the digital side, GCHQ wants cyber security from “boardrooms to living rooms”. None of this is glamorous, but all of it works.

The governments sending out these booklets aren’t trying to scare anyone. They are saying out loud what earlier governments avoided admitting: the state can’t be everywhere in the first 72 hours. In that window, the first responder is you.

The world isn’t preparing for the end. It is preparing for a rougher decade, and we would be wise to do the same, calmly, early and together.

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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.