[en] The generating functional for hard thermal loops in quantum chromodynamics is important in setting up a resummed thermal perturbation theory, so that all terms of a given order in the coupling constant can be consistently taken into account. It is also the functional which leads to a gauge-invariant description of Debye screening and plasma waves in the quark-gluon plasma. We have recently shown that this functional is closely related to the eikonal for a Chern-Simons gauge theory. In this paper, this relationship is explored and explained in more detail along with some generalizations