The postwar United Nations was a response to World War II and a continuation of earlier international institutions. The Allies were commonly described as the United Nations after the United States entered the war. American diplomacy worked to draw additional states into the coalition against Germany and Japan, giving the name an operational meaning before 1945. The League of Nations supplied an institutional precedent whose failures, including American non-membership, informed the later organization. The nineteenth-century International Squadron off Crete provides an older example of multiple powers acting collectively at sea.
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The wartime coalition behind the United Nations name
The Allies used the United Nations name during World War II while the postwar organization also built on earlier international institutions.