If that was true, slavery would never have existed.
This is as close to an answer to the OP as exists. The most reliable way of ensuring a country can peacefully oppose oppression or occupation is having a widespread, almost universal, well organized, system of organized labor. That could, with relative ease trigger a nationwide general strike.
It’s not particularly reliable (certainly not as reliable at preventing occupation by a foreign power as our current method of having a military a couple of order of magnitude more powerful than our neighbors) but it’s the best peaceful method IMO
That would certainly prevent your country from being invaded by a neighbor who intends to subjugate your nation and harvest its industrial capacity for itself, but I don’t think nation-states have really invaded one another for that reason for quite a while - like, a hundred and fifty years or so. Precisely because it’s relatively easy to make that unprofitable.
It wouldn’t protect you from revanchist invaders who want your land and don’t care about the people, or any other motivation invaders may have.
Also, because the act of invasion itself will generally greatly lower the industrial value of the target. Mass bombings do not improve property values. And on top of that, modern warfare and a modern military is very expensive.
That said, it’s much more recent that you say; that was one of Nazi Germany’s motives. The Nazi economy has been described as “vampiric”; they built such a powerful military machine at the cost of largely sacrificing their own economy. They needed to go conquering, just to replace the consumed resources.
Of course, they also lost. Just because some nations continued to think conquest a viable way to profit didn’t make it so.
Which is why it’s obviously the “least worst” option.
It wouldn’t be completely pointless against a more brutal occupation. Even the Nazis relied on the existing workforce and industry in occupied territories.
Which is why widespread, well organized labor strikes are illegal (in the US) under the Taft-Hartley act of 1947.
Because it depends on your aggressor/invader’s behavior, not yours. You can’t make someone else cooperate. How were the passengers aboard United Flight 93, for instance, supposed to calmly talk the hijackers out of their plans, when the hijackers fully intended to fly the jet into the White House or Capitol? They couldn’t. Only physical resistance was going to make any difference.
A national service, similar to the military, whose mission is focused on peaceful, constructive endeavors and not security or maintaining control. An opportunity for people to join out of high school, get paid, get trained in skills, and build goodwill (and thus indirectly security) outside our borders. And an opportunity for some to stay in the service and build a career.
Obviously there’s lots of challenges with building such a program and some of the mission overlaps with the military. To make it work, the cost couldn’t be cheap. If you’re building infrastructure the payroll and materials are going to add up.
The problem with a program to teach civil disobedience as a defense is that it’s a program planning for the last resort. It’s like saying we can save a lot on medical schools if we just teach our future doctors how to build coffins.
Alternatively we can put more emphasis on diplomacy, economic control, and international aid. Not just increasing the budget, but refocusing the mission on using it as a deterant.
Aside from the question of military or foreign aid spending, but to the point of the OP: How much should it cost for US to maintain order and it’s dominant place in the world? Because that’s what it’s all for. The US (or developed world) has the most to lose and it makes sense they have the most to gain by maintaining the status quo.
So you can siphon money from defense into foreign aid or a national service, but it’s unlikely the actual dollar amount will go down much.
I may be missing something, but how is a general strike supposed to do more than temporarily inconvenience an external invader?
I can see how it might work against a domestic government, which needs tax revenues to pay its soldiers, but a foreign army doesn’t depend on your economy. They can just sit on their hands for a few weeks until your strikers run out of savings and have to go back to work so they can put food on the table and pay the rent.
I could get behind a mandatory national service that taught conflict resolution AND ‘basic training’ not to mention an armful of other valuable skills and attitudes, not least of which is encouraging the notion “we’re all in this together”. Any citizen confronted with a loaded gun or a full diaper should know what to do next…
That’s because the whole strategy of the civil rights movement was to get to Northern voters, and through them, the federal government. They didn’t march in Alabama to change the attitude of the people who were actually oppressing them in Alabama, they did it to influence people in New York, who could perhaps threaten the people in Alabama.