  During the past two decades, it has been demonstrated that chiral effective
field theory represents a powerful tool to deal with nuclear forces in a
systematic and model-independent way. Two-, three-, and four-nucleon forces
have been derived up to next-to-next-to-next-to-leading order (N3LO) and
(partially) applied in nuclear few- and many-body systems---with, in general, a
good deal of success. This may suggest that we are finally done with the
nuclear force problem; but that would be too optimistic. There are still some
pretty basic open issues that have been swept under rug and, finally, need our
full attention, like the proper renormalization of the two-nucleon potential.
Moreover, the order-by-order convergence of the many-body force contributions
is at best obscure at this time.
