An anti-Western, anti-Semitic and generally unstable Iran cannot be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon under any circumstances. While sanctions will weaken Tehran’s economy, they won’t shake its nuclear resolve. Unfortunately, the United States, still the lonely armed leader of international democracy, will be forced to carry out air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities within the next year.

I’m not suggesting that the United States should begin lighting up Tehran tomorrow. But the latest round of sanctions, aimed at disrupting Iran’s oil and gas exports and excluding its central bank from the global financial marketplace, ultimately will not deter Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Iran may be forced to lower oil prices in order to find new buyers, but large developing nations will always be thirstier for oil than hungry for American approval. Demand for Iranian oil will be redistributed. Russia and China have refused to enact the sanctions, and continue to buy Iranian oil. Even India, an American ally opposed to Iran becoming a nuclear power, has been unwilling to jeopardize its fuel supply by instituting sanctions.

There is also significant historical evidence that sanctions, though they may weaken recipient nations, rarely succeed in their political objectives. North Korea has continued to build its nuclear program in the face of crippling sanctions designed to stop them from doing just that. This is not to say that sanctions will have no effect. Iran’s economy will flounder, its infrastructure will begin to crumble and its people will stagger under the weight of inflation and, eventually, recession. But this presents President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the opportunity to use sanctions to further galvanize his people around a nationalist nuclear program, scapegoating a hostile West for the nation’s economic woes.

The doves and the disconnected realists argue that Iran can be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon because it would never be irrational enough to risk full-scale military conflict with the United States by using it. But Ahmadinejad is not a rational actor. This is a man who denies the Holocaust and has advocated for the annihilation of the Jewish state. This is an administration that has plotted to assassinate neighboring diplomats, moved warships to Syria in support of Bashar al-Assad’s violent repression of freedom fighters and recently threatened to take preemptive military action against any perceived threats. It seems that an increasingly bellicose Iran is also behind the recent attempted bombings of Israeli targets in India, Thailand and Georgia.

It would be incredibly naive not to question Tehran’s claim that its nuclear capabilities are being developed for peaceful purposes or to imagine that a nuclear Iran is not a threat to Israel, the United States and all Western democracies. Iran has a long history of supporting and sponsoring terrorist organizations, from Hezbollah to the Taliban. Even if Tehran doesn’t launch a nuke itself, we can expect it to share nuclear technology and weapons with terrorists. In allowing Iran to complete a nuclear rise, the United States would also undermine its own legitimacy as a deterrent in the contentious region and encourage other hostile states to emulate Iran by developing their own nuclear weapons.

Iran is undoubtedly a much more immediate threat to Israel than to the United States, so why not let Israel handle the air strike? Put simply, Israel is not capable. Many American military experts, like former CIA director Michael Hayden, say that the Israeli Air Force would be hard-pressed to even position its bombers above Iran for targeted strikes. Some of Iran’s key nuclear facilities are buried deep under concrete reinforcements. Others are built into mountains, and Tehran has just launched a four-day military exercise demonstrating its commitment to protecting these nuclear sites.

The United States is still the singular, mighty military defender of democracy, and we absolutely must take the lead in preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. So we can wait and see if sanctions break Iranian will, but we can only wait for so long. We must strike — in concert with Israel — before Iran brings its most valuable sites underground and fortifies its nuclear facilities from air assault, a process that has already begun. If the next president wants to protect democracy, preserve Israel and ensure America’s long-term security, he will have to make a hard decision. The costs of air strikes may be high, but the costs of inaction will be higher.