The Singaporean passport can enter 192 countries visa free, making it the #1 passport. The passports in 2nd position with 190 countries visa free are Germany’s, Spain’s, and Italy’s, however, those are self explanatory. EU + Schengen + big world powers. What did Singapore do to achieve that?
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Singapore is a prosperous country with a low crime rate and no hostile relations with other countries. Its population is highly educated with a large and strong middle class and its citizens are not known to migrate to other countries in search of work, in fact workers from lower income countries go over there to find work. Your country’s passport tends to get weaker if it has a reputation for crime and terrorism and a high likelihood of its citizens migrating illegally to other countries.
Countries with strong passports are pretty much exclusively high-income countries. The logic is that (1) they’re very unlikely to overstay their visas/illegally immigrate because they already live in a desirable country; (2) they’re likely to have enough money to be tourists that contribute to the tourism economy of the country they’re visiting it. So that explains why the EU, UK, Canada, the US, Australia, NZ, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, etc all have very strong passports.
As for why Singapore specifically is #1, it is politically neutral and doesn’t have a history of colonizing others. For political reasons, some developing countries have a lot of distrust and dislike for European countries, the US, etc. Singapore has never done anything to have that work against them, so they have the visa benefits of being rich without having the visa downsides of political tensions with the Global South.
Its probably more about what their people dont do.
The government stays reasonably neutral in political affairs.
The people dont go to other countries and commit crimes.
Which is better, having access to every country or not needing a passport to go to 25 countries?
Singapore made agreements with a bunch of countries including some obscure ones opening their doors to them just to have more points in the passport. Being #1 is more important than national security.
It depends how you rank it. Technically Singapore is in 5th place, and UAE has the strongest passport: https://www.passportindex.org/byRank.php
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