If you’re going to undermine your own public rhetoric and supposed values by cozying up to a brutal autocrat, you might as well get something out of it. While maybe an obvious point to the rest of us, it’s apparently something US officials are just now belatedly realizing about the US-Saudi relationship.

That “unbreakable” relationship is now suffering maybe the severest strain yet, with the two longtime allies all but at each other’s throats. In a grim but fitting detail for the current political landscape, what finally triggered this wasn’t the ever-growing list of grisly Saudi crimes and abuses — a rap sheet that includes its spy agency’s documented complicity in the September 11 attack that killed thousands of American civilians — but the House of Saud’s seeming to side with Russia over its ally Washington on the steadily escalating war in Ukraine.

Last week, the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries)+ cartel that exercises a quasi-monopoly on world oil agreed, at Saudi urging, to a major production cut of two million barrels per day, which has already sent US gas prices climbing after months of easing. Washington, which objected strenuously to the move to no avail, is already viewing the move as a “hostile act” by the crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, with many observers reading the cut as the Saudi leader’s attempt to create an “October surprise” for the Biden administration, pushing up inflation just in time for next month’s midterm elections. Joe Biden is now talking about “reevaluating” the United States’ relationship with the brutal autocracy in turn.