Since the town hall, gas prices have risen further, now standing at around $3.40, a seven-year high.

“There’s a possibility to be able to bring it down,” he continued. “[It] depends a little bit on Saudi Arabia and a few other things that are in the offing.”

Biden made similar comments at the G-20 summit in October, saying that Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others were withholding their capacity to produce more. “It has a profound impact on working-class families just to get back and forth to work,” he said.

“The United States, through our own policies, has essentially empowered MBS to impose economic sanctions on us,” a senior Senate aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told The Intercept.

MBS’s refusal to bail Biden out by opening the spigot is calculated, said Jon Hoffman, a Middle East analyst who recently penned a critical article on the UAE and Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of UAE capital Abu Dhabi and the country’s de facto ruler, in Foreign Policy. “They definitely know what they’re doing, and those who play innocent and act like this is not a coordinated strategy are either just ignorant or in the pockets of MBS or MBZ,” Hoffman said.

THE POLITICS OF oil, the economy, and foreign policy played out this week as the Biden administration moved ahead with a major arms sale to Saudi Arabia for its war in Yemen while taking heat from a leading Saudi critic, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

The arms sale underscores Biden’s Saudi dilemma, as MBS doesn’t just want the arms — he wants a thank you, without a word of dissent from any Democrat.

Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute and a critic of Saudi Arabia, said the move by MBS is aimed at boosting Republicans, whom the crown prince sees as a more reliable ally. “As I see it, it is part of a broader Saudi strategy to favor the GOP as MBS calculates that a Republican president will reinvest in the idea of dominating the Middle East militarily, which makes the relationship with Saudi Arabia critical once more,” Parsi said.

Regional political realignments have led many key leaders in the Middle East to favor Republican leadership. Following former Democratic President Barack Obama’s pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal in the face of opposition from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Israel, an alliance tightened between the three nations.

Parsi said MBS wants to return to the days when Saudi Arabia was fully immune from any criticism and had U.S. support with no questions asked. ”While Biden has clearly not broken fully with these policies, despite his rhetoric, the Dems — particularly progressives — are adding friction to it and are more hesitant about rehabilitating MBS,” said Parsi. “So for MBS specifically, as well as the Likud [a right-wing Israeli political party] and the leaders in Abu Dhabi, a Republican president and Congress is much preferred. And all three of these states have already shown a significant propensity to interfere in American politics.”

The Saudi intervention in U.S. politics on behalf of the GOP could have profound implications for clean energy policies, as Democrats increasingly have powerful incentives to move away from an oil-based economy that can fall victim to puppeteering by political adversaries. “The answer ultimately is — ultimately meaning the next three or four years — is investing in renewable energy,” Biden said during his town hall, outlining an unrealistically optimistic time frame but describing the direction Democrats plan to go.

Republicans, meanwhile, could have a steady grip on a lever — oil output — that can easily move approval ratings or congressional generic ballots up or down at will. All it takes is looking the other way.