  A few years ago, 't Hooft suggested a way to discuss confinement in a
perturbative fashion. The original idea was put forward in the Coulomb gauge at
tree level. In recent years, the concept of a nonperturbative short distance
linear potential also attracted phenomenological attention. Motivated by these
observations, we discuss how a perturbative framework, leading to a linear
piece in the potential, can be developed in a manifestly gauge and Lorentz
invariant manner, which moreover enjoys the property of being renormalizable to
all orders. We provide an effective action framework to discuss the dynamical
realization of the proposed scenario in Yang-Mills gauge theory.
