 Banach-Mazur distance

For isomorphic finite-dimensional normed vector spaces, the Banach-Mazur distance is the infimum of $\Vert S\Vert \Vert S^{-1}\Vert$ over their linear isomorphisms. If an $N$-dimensional subspace $E$ of a Banach space of cotype 2 satisfies the summing estimate ${\pi }_2(T)\le L\Vert T\Vert$ for operators from ${\ell }_{\infty }^N$, then $d(E,{\ell }_{\infty }^N)\ge \sqrt{N}/L$: compose an isomorphism with the inclusion and use ${\pi }_2(I_E)=\sqrt{N}$.