On the renormalization of the one-pion exchange potential and the consistency of Weinberg's power counting

Nogga, Timmermans and van Kolck recently argued that Weinberg's power counting in the few-nucleon sector is inconsistent and requires modifications. Their argument is based on the observed cutoff dependence of the nucleon-nucleon scattering amplitude calculated by solving the Lippmann-Schwinger equation with the regularized one-pion exchange potential and the cutoff Lambda varied in the range Lambda = 2...20 fm^(-1). In this paper we discuss the role the cutoff plays in the application of chiral effective field theory to the two-nucleon system and study carefully the cutoff-dependence of phase shifts and observables based on the one-pion exchange potential. We show that (i) there is no need to use the momentum-space cutoff larger than Lambda ~ 3 fm^(-1); (ii) the neutron-proton low-energy data show no evidence for an inconsistency of Weinberg's power counting