  We construct the two- and three-nucleon potential based on the most general
chiral effective pion-nucleon Lagrangian using the method of unitary
transformations. For that, we develop a power counting scheme consistent with
this projection formalism. In contrast to previous results obtained in
old-fashioned time-ordered perturbation theory, the method employed leads to
energy-independent potentials. We discuss in detail the similarities and
differences to the existing chiral nucleon-nucleon potentials. We also show
that to leading order in the power counting, the three-nucleon forces vanish
lending credit to the result obtained by Weinberg using old-fashioned
time-ordered perturbation theory.
