I was also wondering whether historians often have the boldness to make a claim like that.
Thanks.
I can't answer to your first question because it is absolutely not my field, but when it comes to the second part, my answer is no. "If xxxx then xxx" is not a very wise thing to say when it comes to history, mainly because we don't know what could have happeend or not happened if something had been different.
An example would be : "If Karl Marx had not written his books, Russia would be a developped Western-Style democracy" (I already heard it once or twice). This is wrong, if Karl Marx had not written his books, we have no idea what would have happened to Russia, it might have become a Western-style democracy or something completely different.
For these reasons I would say that, at least to my knowledge, historians avoid as much as possible "Historical what if".
As someone wrote above, historians don't really deal in hypotheticals, but the people over at /r/historicalwhatif love questions like this.