Most people will tolerate corruption where it serves them. The dominant nations of the world enjoy hegemony over the less powerful nations and extract wealth and resources from the less powerful. This is the reality of imperialism. The dominant nations use their power to enrich themselves and there tends to be less corruption within those nations while the 'developing' nations tend to suffer from more corruption internally. It is very difficult for citizens of weak nations where the government is internally corrupt. The citizens of the wealthy nations are mostly prepared to turn a blind eye to the way their governments extract wealth from less powerful and dominant nations because those citizens benefit from that hegemony. Many would even deny they benefit from the extraordinary privilege enjoyed by their globally dominant nation states citizenship. Competition for resources and territory is embedded in our DNA and the notion of corruption is a layer of ethical coding/sophistry overlaying the deeper drives of our DNA.