With a worse global financial tsunami, the world could easily become a much more terrible place to live. However, the easiest way to kick things off would still easily be a later "tsunami", the election of John McCain in 2008 and a subsequent Palin presidency.
If anyone is to accept this challenge, let's begin with a table of worst possible leaders that would effectively ruin the world (though a total nuclear war is forbidden in this AHC as of May 2013 in TTL):
Just imagine, if these people are in power... (this is just a random list, please introduce to us your idea)
United States: President Sarah Palin / Mark Sanford / Elliot Spitzer / Dick Cheney
France: President Marine Le Pen / Dominique Strauss-Kahn
Japan: Prime Minister Ichiro Ozawa / Toru Hashimoto
Spain: Prime Minister Cayo Lara
Greece: Prime Minister Nikolaos Michaloliakos (borderline ASB)
Austria: Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache / Jorg Haider
Israel - Tzvi Fishman
Lebanon - Hassan Nasrallah
Egypt - President Emad Abdel Ghaffour
Can anyone think of other ideas as for how we could possibly construct a dystopian 2010s, or an alternate list of leaders?