I think that's giving Americans too much credit. It's definitely giving the American government too much credit.

The situation over here is that a lot of oil is produced on privately owned or previously leased land, which the feds thankfully have limited control over. My understanding is that it's still pretty difficult to get federal permission for new drilling and exploration, in the situations where that's required.

Individual states have more control over oil production and like other oil states around the world that leads to certain corruption related problems, but the oil keeps flowing.

Tl;dr: Private oil producers in America are able to partially respond to price signals, despite the Feds efforts to suppress oil production.