The Obama administration’s increasingly aggressive sanctions against Iran will likely fail to stop Tehran’s quest for nuclear warheads and may well fail to prevent a pre-emptive attack by Israel on nuclear facilities, U.S. officials and analysts said.

The president signed an executive order Monday placing the most stringent sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank in decades. In a letter to Congress, Obama said the sanctions would allow broad asset freezes of Iran’s finances “in light of the deceptive practices of the Central Bank of Iran and other Iranian banks to conceal transactions. …”