Axios

As Israeli bombs fell on the supreme leader's compound in Tehran on Saturday morning, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was meeting above ground with several of his top advisers.

• He never saw it coming.

Why it matters: The joint U.S.-Israeli operation that killed Khamenei was the culmination of two months in which President Trump pursued both diplomacy and war — on parallel tracks. On Friday, he chose war.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in an Israeli strike Saturday as part of a massive joint military operation between the U.S. and Israel, Iranian state media confirmed.

The latest: The Iranian government announced 40 days of public mourning following the "martyrdom" of the 86-year-old ayatollah, who had ruled Iran for over 36 years.

President Trump's bid to topple Iran's regime marks a sharp break from two decades of U.S. intervention playbooks across multiple presidencies.

The big picture: Trump's weekend strikes on Iran — and his explicit call for an uprising — diverge from how the U.S. approached regime pressure in Iraq and Venezuela, historians tell Axios. The gamble signals a more unpredictable stretch of his foreign policy ahead as he openly threatens force elsewhere.