So I went into a bit of a deep dive.

Observatory.wiki is curated by members of the Independent Media Institute. The Independent Media Institute has, as one of its major donors the New World Foundation.

The New World Foundation was founded by a billionaire heiress, had Hillary Clinton as one of its board members in the 80s, is New Left (rejecting ties with labor to focus on personal liberties), and has investments in tobacco companies, fast fashion companies, and logging companies. Joan Roelofs, a professor in political science, used it as a case study of how donations (and the threat of withholding them) are used to push left-wing charities towards compliance with neoliberal ideas in her book Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism.

It is unsurprising, then, that this story credits neoliberal globalists initiatives without skepticism or broader contextualization. Maybe it really is that simple and the US helped Kazachstan out of the goodness of its heart. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Though… why does it credit Kazachstan for preserving ‘their part’ of the Aral Sea by creating a massive dam? Don’t dams keep water out of places? Why is Uzbekistan given the blame here, when the article says that the US helped Kazachstan first and Uzbekistan second? Did the US just work together with Kazachstan to monopolize the Kazach part of the water flowing into the Aral sea and then blame Uzbekistan for the shared lake continuing to dry up?

Is the US holding the Aral Sea hostage to pressure Uzbekistan into compliance?

(disclaimer: this is less than an hour’s work. I could truly be mistaken. Please do more thorough research before using this as evidence).