Trump ends 28 years of US neutrality on Irish unity at a golf course he owns.

…(cont) It died at a golf course. Specifically the one in Ireland that the president of the United States owns, where the president, on a visit built around the Irish Open and a set of official talks, told reporters he would "love" to see a unified Ireland — "fantastic," he called it, per the New York Times, breaking in one sentence a precedent his predecessors had left alone.

The timing did the neutrality no favors. Days earlier, the United Kingdom's own prime minister had called unification off the table, according to the New York Post, which noted that under the Good Friday Agreement itself it is London that holds the power to call any such referendum, and that both Ireland's require a majority vote before anything changes hands. The president's preference settled nothing legally. It simply became, per ABC News, the thing Irish leaders were now reacting to, with what the wire dryly calls "ire," while CBS confirmed the golf course was his and the trip was, on paper, official business.

None of this required malarkey to make strange; the arrangement did the work on its own. A policy kept, quietly, through the length of a generation did not survive a press availability at a driving range. It went the way of things that are never written down because everyone assumed the room understood: a hundred careful cables, a hundred State Department briefings on saying nothing, undone by a man answering a question he could have declined.

Survived by: the Good Friday Agreement, still standing, still requiring the same two votes it always required, now doing so without the quiet American thumb that used to stay off the scale.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that visiting heads of state be asked, before any microphone is placed near them, whether they have anything to say about a peace they did not help build, and that they be permitted to answer "no comment" without it costing anyone a war.