Tunisia said on Saturday that it intends to join the BRICS countries bloc of emerging economies that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

“We will accept no dictates or interference in Tunisia’s internal affairs. We are negotiating the terms, but we refuse to receive instructions and the EU’s agenda,”

Mabrouk described the BRICS nations as “a political, economic and financial alternative that will enable Tunisia to open up to the new world.”

As Edward Luce pointed out in an insightful column in the Financial Times, we are already effectively engaged in a Cold War with China. “The consensus,” he writes, “is now so hawkish that it is liable to see any outreach to China as weakness.” You could hear that hawkish consensus in the words of U.S. intelligence chiefs as they testified before the Congress during their annual threat assessment hearing on Wednesday.

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines cited China’s ruling Communist Party as the “most consequential” national security threat the U.S. faces. Never mind domestic extremism, enabled by one of the two major political parties. Never mind global warming. Never mind Russia waging an active war in Europe while aggressively pumping out disinformation and promoting authoritarianism worldwide.

Why is it such a great threat even though the country has no history of conquest beyond its region in 5,000 years of history and is far from being able or inclined to pose a direct threat of attack to the U.S.? According to Haines, the reason focusing on China is the intel community's top priority is that China is “increasingly challenging the United States economically, technologically, politically, and militarily around the world.” She continued, asserting that the goal of China’s President Xi Jinping is to “continue efforts to achieve Xi’s vision of making China the preeminent power in East Asia and a major power on the world stage.”

Saudi Arabia and Iran announced an agreement in China on Friday to resume relations more than seven years after severing ties, a major breakthrough in a bitter rivalry that has long divided the Middle East.

part of an initiative by Chinese President Xi Jinping aimed at “developing good neighborly relations” between Iran and Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran in 2016 after the Saudi Embassy in Tehran was attacked and burned by Iranian protesters, angered by the kingdom’s execution of prominent Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqr al-Nimr. The cleric had emerged as a leading figure in protests in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, a Shiite-majority region in the Sunni-majority nation.