LONDON—And suddenly, within the space of a week, ethics & compliance officers have all the ammunition they need to tell cynics once and for all why eradicating corruption is so important.

Here in the United Kingdom (where I am spending the week on business), the word “war” is on the front page of every newspaper you see. Every TV news broadcast starts with Ukraine. Few people talk about the crisis all that much, but they do steal glances at the BBC or Sky News every time the subject crosses an announcer's lips. What's happened now? Has Russia invaded? Are we wrong to do nothing?

The mood here, in a word, is sobering. The crisis in Ukraine has jolted everyone; this is a major military power invading a major European trading partner, with the prospect of armies shooting at each other. This is Prague in 1968 or Hungary in 1956, with everyone wondering what happens next.

And yet, for compliance officers, Ukraine is only one piece of a set right now. Those of you with big business units in Europe are swallowing hard right now, yes—but those of you with big business in Latin America are swallowing hard about Venezuela. In case you missed it, el presidente Nicolas Maduro spent the last week there shooting protesters in Caracas every bit as viciously as Viktor Yanukovych did in Kiev the week before. And compliance officers with big business in the Middle East have been aghast at Turkey for months, where prime minister Recep Erdogan's administration has been fighting corruption allegations night and day, and Syria has turned into a geopolitical nightmare.

Syria, Turkey, Venezuela, Ukraine. You could just as easily add North Korea, the Central African Republic, and half-dozen other states. They all pose terrible problems for the Western world, and they are all connected. They all have a common denominator, a through-line that runs from their capitols straight to your boardroom.

Corruption.

Russia's invasion of the Ukraine is not a revival of the Cold War. There is no clash of ideologies here. Vladimir Putin's invasion is simply the natural tendency of corrupt regimes: to maintain themselves by any means necessary, violent or otherwise. We saw that in Venezuela when Maduro's forces shot protestors. We saw it in Turkey when Erdogan sacked the prosecutors investigating him. This is what corrupt regimes do, because those regimes are inherently fearful, and they will lash out to protect what strength they can.

Dealing with corrupt regimes will be the primary foreign policy challenge for President Obama, whoever succeeds him, the European Union, and the rest of the civilized world, probably for years to come. Yet while the goals of corrupt regimes may differ from the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the strategy for dealing with them doesn't. The strategy is containment.

And that's where you and your bosses in the boardroom enter the picture.

Containment of corrupt regimes will look and feel quite different than containing the Soviet Union and communism. It will involve more anti-money laundering rules, as we've already seen from the United Kingdom and the U.S. Treasury just last week for Ukraine alone. It will mean continued enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, as well as the U.K. Bribery Act and a host of other anti-bribery laws coming onto the books worldwide. It will mean trade sanctions. It might even mean more shareholder activism pressuring companies to divest from troubling regimes, as we saw in the 1980s with apartied and South Africa.

Put simply, containing communism in the 20th centurty required military force from Western governments to counter the military force of the Soviet Union. Containing corruption in the 21st century will, to a far greater degree, require Western regulation of economic transactions, to find and block corrupt economic transactions. Our governments will push us all to suffocate corrupt regimes by cutting off their access to money. 

How to put those government imperatives into practice will fall to corporate boardrooms across the Western world, and compliance officers will be the ones to help boards understand what they should do. It's going to be a long, complicated slog, so we can expect lots of head-scratching as we try to build compliance systems to meet the challenge of the task.

The good news: most of you have the word “ethics” in your title, and on that front the argument to fight corruption is now blissfully short. Point to the ugly battles erupting all over the world as corrupt regimes try to cling to power any way they can. Those people are wrong, they make innocent people suffer, and they should be stopped. That's why we do this.  

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