Before he was named as the administration’s special envoy on international energy, David Goldwyn advocated for closer ties to Stalinist Turkmenistan as head of the energy industry-endowed U.S.-Turkmenistan Business Council. That group argued for closer ties with the government there on the grounds of its energy reserves and alleged progress on human rights.
Here’s the latest news from Turkmenistan: The Turkmen dictator, who is coming to the U.S. in about a week, is panicked at the idea of Turkmen kids going to college. Of course there is no college in Turkmenistan, so the only way to get a higher education is to leave the country. So he’s clamped on controls to stop kids from going abroad to get an education. His thinking is pretty self-evident: anyone with a college education would probably want to overthrow his government, and that’s almost certainly true.
