Look at the "great cannon" attack for an example of why securing the middle is important. Secure software obviously shouldn't trust the middle, but the middle being compromised means that insecure software can do orders of magnitude more damage.

Moreover the middle can just shut down. Especially for things like embassies it's not a good idea to give the adversaries an easy off switch.

I agree that "encrypt all the things" would be a very nice addition.