  Motivated by the successes of relativistic theories in studies of
atomic/molecular and nuclear systems and the need for a relativistic chiral
force in relativistic nuclear structure studies, we explore a new relativistic
scheme to construct the nucleon-nucleon interaction in the framework of
covariant chiral effective field theory. The chiral interaction is formulated
up to leading order with covariant power counting and a Lorentz invariant
chiral Lagrangian. We find that the relativistic scheme induces all six spin
operators needed to describe the nuclear force. A detailed investigation of the
partial wave potentials shows a better description of the $^1S_0$ and $^3P_0$
phase shifts than the leading order Weinberg approach, and similar to that of
the next-to-leading order Weinberg approach. For the other partial waves with
angular momenta $J\geq 1$, the relativistic results are almost the same as
their leading order non-relativistic counterparts.
