  I describe recent progress towards a theory of the NN force which captures
the consequences of QCD's chiral symmetry and the pattern of its breaking, and
is formulated as an expansion in a ratio of low and high mass scales,
M_{lo}/M_{hi}. This "chiral effective field theory" of the NN system is a firm
foundation for explorations of nuclear structure and reactions that are
grounded in QCD's low-energy symmetries. While calculations that use a ChiPT
expansion for the NN potential have proven very successful, they can only be
used with a narrow range of momentum-space cutoffs, which leaves the expansion
parameter for observable quantities somewhat murky. Here we seek a truly
systematic effective field theory for the NN amplitude, that is manifestly
renormalization-group invariant at each order in a demonstrably perturbative
expansion.
