How to COUNTIFS with OR and >= Operator logic

I’ve found threads that addressed OR logic or operator logic but none together and it’s not working for me.

Let’s say I have a table like this:

Col1    Col2(Date)    Col3(Date)

I want to use countifs to get the number of rows where Col2, Col3 is either Blank OR is >= Date_Variable(A date I’ve defined in Define Names)

I’ve tried the formula but clearly the syntax is wrong

=COUNTIFS(Col2,{"",">="&Date_Variable},Col3,{"",">="&Date_Variable})