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An academic has called for New Zealand to do more to push for UN Security Council reform after “extremely worrying” escalations in Iran.

The United States has entered the Israel-Iran conflict via Operation Midnight Hammer, which bombed several key Iranian nuclear facilities.

The attack cut short President Donald Trump’s two-week deadline for Iran to re-enter negotiations, which lasted about 48 hours.

“Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” he said.

Iran’s foreign minister said Washington crossed a “very big red line” - and its Parliament has reportedly voted to shut the Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world’s oil consumption is transported.

University of Otago international relations professor Robert Patman told The Front Page that New Zealand could join other small and medium nations in pressing for a UN Security Council reform.

“At the moment, the UN Security Council has been completely marginalised by the fact that five countries decide matters of war and peace in the world because they have the power of veto.

“They can block anything they don’t like internationally, and that means effectively that countries like the US, Russia, and China have got tremendous freedom of autonomy. They’re not accountable, in short.

“Who is going to hold the Trump administration accountable for what they’ve just done, other than their own people within the United States and the reaction of the rest of the world, in diplomatic terms?

“We need to constrain the use of the veto, and we need to make the UN Security Council capable of doing what it’s supposed to do, which is being a barrier to war and also fulfilling its responsibility of maintaining global peace and security. At the moment, that institution can’t do its job; it’s dysfunctional.

“That worries me a great deal because the rest of the world is paying the price for the fact that the three biggest law breakers on the planet are all permanent members of the Security Council,“ he said.

The UN Security Council has 15 members and five “permanent members” have what’s called a veto power.

Decisions require affirmative votes of at least nine members, but just one negative veto vote fromthe US, China, Russia, France or the UK - prevents a proposal.

The veto has long been a point of frustration for New Zealand. Last year, while speaking about the Gaza crisis, Foreign Minister Winston Peters told the United Nations that since the start of the crisis, the veto had been used five times to prevent the Security Council from acting decisively.

“This has seen the council fail in its responsibility to maintain international peace and security,” he said at the time.

This week, Peters has called the escalation in the Middle East “extremely worrying” and pushed for “diplomacy and dialogue”.

Patman said New Zealand’s response has been very guarded so far.

“We do have to be quite careful because New Zealand as a country does depend heavily on the rules-based international order... This type of action is one of many that we’ve seen, not just from the Trump administration, but going back, we’ve got the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China’s outlandish claim to 90% of the South China Sea, the US invasion of Iraq, the list goes on.

“We’ve had a whole series of events in the post-9/11 period which have gradually eroded the idea of international relations being based on rules, process, and principles, and that’s the sort of world that New Zealand wants.

“I think many people are expecting a country like New Zealand, which has championed non-nuclear security, to have a position on this issue,” he said.